Edmonton hospital patient had been hoping for a care home. He wound up at a hotel instead

An Edmonton family is frustrated and upset after a 62-year-old man who had been in hospital with care needs was sent to stay at a hotel.

Blair Canniff had been a patient at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for roughly six months when he said a social worker told him he was going to be moved.

“They told me I was going to a facility for long-term care,” Canniff recalled of the conversation. “They told me where it was, in Leduc, and that’s all I knew.”

With a paralyzed left side after a stroke, Canniff uses a wheelchair and said he had been expecting to move to some type of assisted-living facility.

On March 4, he said, he was placed in a taxi that took him to a Travelodge in Leduc, roughly 35 kilometres south of Edmonton.

“It was sort of a joke,” he said, when asked about his reaction pulling up to a hotel.

Prior to his move, Canniff said he was not given a list of options to pick from and said he was not given a choice. He said the organization running the program at the hotel was Contentment Social Services.

A hotel, not a LTC facility

At the hotel, Canniff said he received a few visits a day from health-care workers but he struggled to get to the bathroom because the door was too narrow, and into bed because there wasn’t room for his chair at the side of the bed.

On the same day he was moved to the hotel, he said he asked his wife Myna Manniapik to help him.

“I asked him, ‘Oh, is it all fixed up for wheelchair users?'” recalled Manniapik. “And he said, ‘No, it’s just like a motel, any hotel room, and I can’t get into the bathroom and I need help to get to bed.’

“If something happens to his good arm, then he would become totally helpless… The facility is not set up for disabled [people] or [the] elderly or for anyone that needs assisting.”

Manniapik was also worried because Canniff was being fed fast food and said his hygiene was also not managed. 

“I was really sad to see the kind of care he was getting, which was not even care as far as I’m concerned.”

CBC News spoke with a front desk staff worker who reiterated the Travelodge was a hotel, not a long-term care facility, with rooms that could be booked online by the general public.

On Wednesday, the employee said an organization had rented out between eight to 10 rooms for several days and that a worker would come during the day to…