This N.B. man has spent 15 months in hospital while waiting for a nursing home bed

A New Brunswick man has been waiting for a nursing home bed for 15 months.

The sun was shining when Harold ‘Malcolm’ Jones left the Saint John Regional Hospital for the first time in a year.

His first cousin, Karen Wilson, was taking him to see his uncle on July 17.

“When I went there to take over his care, I’m not exaggerating, he had a pair of hospital socks, one pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt and a hoodie. That’s what he had. And at that point, he had already been in the hospital for a year,” Wilson said.

Wilson says her cousin has lived a challenging and, at times, isolating life.

The 68-year-old was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was a child. Today, he lives with Parkinson’s disease as well as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), along with his mental illness.

His grandmother was his caregiver, but when she passed away, Jones was able to lead a mostly independent life, and lived alone in a room in a Saint John, N.B., apartment building.

But his health took a turn, and he was evicted from the building in the summer of 2024.

That landed him at the Saint John Regional Hospital, where he remains today.

In an interview with CTV News, Wilson — who became Jones’s power-of-attorney in October — said she’s exasperated at the red tape, and “no” attitude she’s received from the system while she tries to get Jones the help he needs.

“Mostly, he just lays in bed every day. All day,” she said. “I got him a tablet, showed him how to watch his movies on YouTube just recently. Last couple weeks, I got him a pair of noise-cancelling headphones because there is a lot of chaos there.”

Jones couldn’t get on the nursing home waitlist because he had no ID.

So, Wilson went through the process to get Jones an ID, birth certificate and reactivated his bank account. She’s also done his taxes.

She felt everything was falling into place, and in late October she was told he was placed on the waitlist for a nursing home bed.

“And [the social worker] said, well, right now the good news is there’s a priority list for patients in hospital waiting for placement. So, he will go to the top of the list that expires Nov. 17,” Wilson recalls.

“So, I thought, ‘Great, we’re on the list.’”

Two weeks later, Wilson says she was told a signature was missing on his form — and he was never actually on the waitlist.

And now, she says a social worker told her the prioritization of moving patients in hospital beds to nursing homes has ended.

“Once that list expires for priority people in the hospital beds, they will then be taken off of the priority and put in the bottom of the list, or wherever they would have fallen had a list not existed,” Wilson says she was told.

“And now we’re looking at six-to-eight months. And I said to the charge nurse today, ‘How am I supposed to tell him that? He asks me every day if they’ve called yet for a place.’”

The retired schoolteacher says Jones’s story isn’t meant to point fingers at health-care workers, but she feels navigating a system that’s supposed to help people has been incredibly challenging.

Wilson says, while he waits, she’s asked for him to have access to physiotherapy, dental and counselling through the hospital.

“Everywhere I turn, I’m told ‘no,’” she said.

Hospitals continue to be at or overcapacity

Wilson worries about the alternate-level-of-care patients (ALC) who do not have a family member advocating for them.

For years, New Brunswick hospitals have struggled with the number of ALC patients — those who don’t require hospital care, but cannot live on their own, so they’re waiting for a bed to become available in a long-term care or special care home.

According to Horizon Health Network’s weekly monitoring report, the Saint John Regional Hospital is at 98.3 per cent capacity.

But the number of ALC patients waiting at the hospital has decreased — from 21 in September to 12 on Nov. 17.

The Coalition for Seniors nursing home waitlist increased in October. As of Oct. 31, there were 1,158 people waiting for a nursing home bed. Of those, 490 were waiting in hospital.

That number doesn’t include Jones — until all the proper documentation is completed, Wilson says.

She mostly worries about what the wait is doing to his mental health.

“Because if you keep reaching for something and you know, eventually, you’re never going to get it, you’re going to stop reaching,” she said.

Horizon Health referred CTV News to the Department of Social Development for comment, stating the department oversees the Nursing Home Act and the “parameters around placement.”

The department sent CTV News Atlantic a statement, saying the ALC prioritization in fact ended on Nov. 13 for the Saint John Regional Hospital, Moncton City Hospital, the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre, and the Miramichi Regional Hospital.

It remains in place for the Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton.

“When the ALC prioritization process is in place for a hospital, it allows eligible patients in that facility to be prioritized for nursing home placement. However, when the prioritization period ends, nursing homes return to the regular, province-wide admission process,” the statement reads. “Under that process, individuals are selected chronologically, based on the date they were approved for nursing home placement by the Department of Social Development.”

Wilson said late Tuesday they received confirmation Jones is officially on the list, which means, according to the department’s guidelines, he is at the bottom of the list.

The department confirmed the average wait time for the southwest zone, which includes Saint John, is 125 days.

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