Alberta father speaks out about Rotary Flames House staff redeployment

An Alberta father who lost his son to leukemia is speaking out about healthcare staff being redeployed from Rotary Flames House.

Sean Rooney, from Medicine Hat, tells CityNews his son Dominic was a patient at the hospice before he died.

“It was an exceptional facility, absolutely,” Sean said. “It had all sorts of ways of just trying to be at peace — a lot more relaxed of a setting than the actual hospital itself — you still got all the care you needed, but at that point, when you’re on palliative care, of course, it’s more about quality of life than quantity of life.

“They did everything they could for us there, and I’ll never forget that.”

Dominic was diagnosed with the terminal illness when he was 11 months old. Sean says Dominic spent the better part of two years at the Alberta Children’s Hospital and was moved to Rotary Flames House in the last few months of his life. He died a month before his third birthday.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) made the call to move hospice staff to Alberta Children’s Hospital to deal with a surge of respiratory illnesses on Saturday.

AHS says it will work together with families to discharge respite care patients from the Rotary Flames House by Tuesday, Dec. 6.

Sean says he feels terrible for families who are being told respite services are being paused at the hospice.

“It’s really not fair, they didn’t do anything to deserve this,” he said.

“Nobody wants to see this happen, and the question is going to be, ‘what can we do to get this back to normal?'”

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Margaret Fullerton, a registered nurse and senior operating officer at  Alberta Children’s Hospital, says several nurses and healthcare aids are being redeployed from the hospice — enough to open up six additional beds at the hospital.

Fullerton says it’s important to recognize what respite services are now that they are being paused.

“Respite services are services that we provide to medically stable children, although they’re complex children,” Fullerton said.

She says palliative care and end-of-life care, which are very different from respite services, will continue, albeit at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

Fullerton adds there were no palliative or end-of-life patients at the Rotary Flames House when AHS made the “tough” decision to pause respite care admissions.

“Opening up those beds is all part of the plan that we have to open up capacity during this time of need for acutely ill children,” Fullerton said. “The six beds are going to be geared towards short stay — we’re calling it a ‘medically acute short stay unit.'”

The Rotary Flames House cares for about seven respite patients per week.

Sean says no matter the type of care your child receives at the hospice, the services and comfort it provides are extremely valuable.

“There’s more space, there’s everything from foosball tables downstairs and a sensory room to pianos,” Sean said. “It’s more of a home, even though you’re getting the same level of care that you are in a hospital, and it’s really beneficial to everybody.”

He adds healthcare workers need support now more than ever, and expressed curiosity as to why support for hospital staff seems to have waned, referring to when people would show their appreciation for frontline workers daily during the height of the pandemic.

“People think that they are done with all these issues — with the pandemic and whatnot — and unfortunately it takes something really, really bad like this to rock us back to the reality that there’s still really big problems,” Sean said.

– With files from Tiffany Goodwein and Rachneet Randhawa