Macleans.ca | Top Stories | Health | A nasty battle at the old age home

Elder Institutionalism at its worst. Loving care sounds good but how do you deliver it? QJ
Macleans.ca Top Stories Health A nasty battle at the old age home: "A nasty battle at the old age home
How did a small dispute at a respectable seniors' home escalate into this?
JONATHON GATEHOUSE
If pictures tell the story, Gerald Bargman's had a horrible ending. Photos from his final weeks show him propped up in a hospital bed, his arms covered with painful-looking sores, and body so shockingly wizened that you can see each rib, tendon and bone. By the time he died at the age of 63 on July 23, 2005, Bargman's six-foot-two frame had shrunk from 170 to well under 90 lb. He was essentially a skeleton with skin.
The list of ailments that landed him in intensive care at a Toronto hospital is long -- pneumonia, respiratory failure, Crohn's disease, sepsis, an antibiotic-resistant infection -- although it catalogues only a fraction of his medical problems. But it is diagnosis number seven on his final medical report -- malnutrition -- that his loved ones have seized upon. Proof, they say, of their allegation that one of Canada's most respected centres for geriatric care, Baycrest, let a patient starve to death in order to get back at a family that complained too loud, and too often. 'It was due to negligence. It was due to neglect. It was cruel,' says Carol Bargman, Gerald's sister. Depressed and isolated because administrators had restricted his son Allen's visiting privileges following a series of altercations with staff, Gerald Bargman wasted away. And Baycrest, the family alleges, did little to stop it. 'At the end, he looked like he'd just come out of the concentration camps,' says Carol. 'He was like a poster boy for Auschwitz.' "