Fraser Health and Burnaby’s New Vista Care Home hope to have a ban on deliveries of home-cooked food lifted by next week, according to the health authority’s interim chief medical health officer.
The NOW talked to a woman this week who was devastated when New Vista told her on Sunday she was no longer allowed to bring her husband of 52 years home-cooked meals at the care home.
Since Aug. 8, New Vista has been battling a COVID-19 outbreak that has been “quite challenging,” according to Dr. Elizabeth Brodkin,
So far 18 staff members and 25 residents have tested positive for the disease, and nine residents have died.
Infection control experts are visiting the site daily, Brodkin said.
“The infection control consultants are always on the lookout for things that need to be tweaked and perhaps haven’t been addressed yet,” she said.
When the infection control specialist was at New Vista last weekend, Brodkin said he realized there were a “large number of packages and parcels that were being delivered.”
“It wasn’t all food, there were various things, and the whole process of packaging them up and dropping them off and then getting them delivered to the residents that they were destined for was not happening in a safe way,” Brodkin said.
The temporary ban on deliveries from families will give Fraser Health time to work with the care home to “improve their practice and make it safe,” according to Brodkin.
She said food is “not a source of transmission for COVID at all,” but New Vista needs to put practices in place to ensure it is safely packaged in containers that can be wiped down when they arrive at the care home.
“You can’t wipe down a paper bag, for example,” Brodkin said. “You can wipe down a Tupperware container that’s sealed.”
She said Fraser Health already has guidelines and policies around safe ways to deliver food and other items, whether there is an active outbreak at the facility or not, and the health authority will now work with New Vista to make sure they are followed.
Brodkin said she couldn’t say for certain whether the virus was actually transmitted through any of the packages delivered to New Vista.
“Infection control is a question of walking around and looking for places where best practices are not happening,” she said.
Once the new, safer practices are put in place, food deliveries at New Vista will resume, according to Brodkin
“I’m very hopeful that’ll happen some time next week,” she said.
