Laura Kyle says her mom Barbara Donaldson was in hospital for more than seven months before passing away in September
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The province’s cancellation of contracts for as many as seven new long-term-care homes is drawing attention to the thousands of older people languishing in hospital beds while waiting to get into a home, with some dying on the waitlist.
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Laura Kyle says her mother, Barbara Donaldson, spent seven months in hospital with Parkinson’s, first at Victoria General and then at the Gorge Road Health Centre, before dying in September.
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She says that Vancouver Island Health Authority officials had told them that the wait for a long-term care bed could have taken another two years and that several programs that would have allowed Donaldson to stay at home no longer existed.
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“When my mom went into the hospital in February of 2025, she was really only needing to be in hospital in an acute care setting for about a month because she recovered and was deemed ready for discharge, but VIHA said we have to stay there until we figure out what she’s doing, because she couldn’t go back to her independent living suite,” said Kyle.
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“VIHA presented me with four different options, one after the other, and confirmed that they could do each one of these kind of in a row that would allow her to stay in her suite and get full care from VIHA, and one after the other, we were told that each option was eliminated until the only option left was to wait in hospital for a public long-term care bed.”
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Kyle said by that point the waitlist had grown to 12 to 18 months and health workers eventually said it would be two years until her mom could get a bed.
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She said she sent emails to her local MLA, Health Minister Josie Osborne and Premier David Eby, but the only response she got was a form letter from Osborne’s office. She and her husband were even preparing to borrow against their home to get Donaldson into a private home just before she died.
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“My mom came to the top of the waitlist for that private facility that we’d applied for, so we thought, great, we got everything all arranged for her to move in the following week, got everything set up in her new home, and the day we showed up at the hospital to move her into her new home, we found her slumped over in her chair and basically incoherent,” said Kyle. She said her mother was moved into palliative care two days later.
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“That’s what I sit with today, is you know, knowing that our provincial government, David Eby, Josie Osborne, knew that this crisis was coming, yet they have chosen to basically ignore it.”
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Statistics provided by Osborne during debate on the budget for her ministry show that 7,829 seniors are on waitlists for long-term care beds in B.C.
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The wait time in the Island Health region averages 345 days, with some seniors waiting as long as 1,861 days. The situation is even worse for some in Vancouver Coastal Health with the maximum wait hitting 2,825 days. The average wait time in the health authority is 315 days. Northern Health has the highest average wait time at 376 days.
