The last month has been a mixed bag of emotions for the staff and residents at the Chez Nous Senior Care Home.

On Jan. 6, an outbreak of COVID-19 was declared at the charity-owned personal care home after two staff members tested positive for the virus. The staff members were quickly quarantined and everyone in the building underwent multiple rounds of testing.

Now, one month later, the Government of Saskatchewan has officially declared the outbreak to be over.

Manon Desruisseaux, Chez Nous's manager, says the last month has been unbelievably hard on the facility.

"I'm very thankful that no residents were infected. We caught that soon enough and removed a lot of people off work to make sure that transmission didn't happen."

In total, the care home was short of eight staff for two weeks. Desruisseaux says this had a significant impact on the rest of the team.

"Lots of people had to work lots of overtime since we're not allowed to have any people come in and volunteer. That was pretty financially taxing for us as it would be for any business."

In response to the shortage, Chez Nous put a call out for any "angels" who would be willing to help run errands or bring food to the facility. The response, according to Desruisseaux, was phenomenal.

"In all my years here, I have never seen that many people wanting to volunteer. We've had 24 people contact us to be angels. A lot of families stepped up and brought us meals when we were short cooks for a few weeks."

The response from the community has been amazing, says Desruisseaux, however she's much more disappointed with the amount of support the care home was given by the Saskatchewan Health Authority throughout the crisis.

"I really thought that the SHA would be more helpful to us but it didn't work out that way. We found out that personal care homes are basically left on their own to manage all this by themselves. That's really sad because there are a lot of personal care homes in Saskatchewan that needed some guidance. When you reach out for help and it isn't there, then you just have to learn how to do it on your own."

In particular, Desruisseaux says the lack of transparency with the residents' test results made the staff's job incredibly difficult. In the middle of the most rigorous phase of testing, the SHA was not providing results to the management team at Chez Nous, forcing Desruisseaux to get answers from the families of their residents.

"Sometime's it's hard to get families to get back to you. We needed to know whether someone was positive or negative as soon as possible. It's difficult because the test results are confidential and the SHA won't send me the results."

Discover Moose Jaw reached out to the Saskatchewan Health Authority to provide some clarity on this issue. We received the following written statement:

"The Saskatchewan Health Authority will notify individuals about a positive test for COVID-19, along with their responsible health care provider (family physician, nurse practitioner). If an individual is a resident of a care home (such as a special care home or personal care home), that facility would also be notified that a resident has tested positive so they are able to take precautions to reduce the risk of transmission within the facility, and to assist in the contact investigation. We are working to ensure our teams across the province are aware that positive results can be shared with care homes...Whether the test result is positive or negative, the SHA would not notify anyone who is outside of the patient’s circle of care, as we continue to take significant effort to ensure privacy of health information while balancing the risks to the community."

In the case of the Chez Nous outbreak, none of the residents of the care home ended up testing positive for COVID-19. Given the SHA's statement, it appears that the reason that the management team was not directly informed of the test results was because all the results were negative. Desruisseaux believes this approach does not give care homes the level of support that they should be provided with from the SHA.

"We're trying to work with the Ministry of Health to change that...They're working on it, but one month later and I still don't have access to those results."

Having weathered this stressful time successfully, Desruisseaux is confident that Chez Nous will be prepared for whatever changes may be down the road.