The Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario cut back on investigations into deaths of residents in long-term care homes in order to save money, a public inquiry has learned. In 2013, the coroner’s office ended the practice of automatically probing every 10th death in a long-term care home, Chief Coroner Dr. Dirk Huyer testified on Monday at a public hearing looking into how ex-nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer went undetected as she killed eight residents.The move, saving $900,000 a year, came in the midst of Wettlaufer’s killing spree at long-term care homes in southwestern Ontario. There’s no indication such a review would have flagged Wettlaufer’s crimes, which occurred between 2007 and 2016.Huyer said the practice of automatically investigating the “threshold deaths” had not provided good value for money. “We weren’t finding trends or patterns or specific issues,” he said.The change in policy came at around the same time as the Ontario health ministry increased its oversight of the long-term care sector. Because of this, there was “no incremental value of routine reviews” by coroners as well, according to documents from the coroner’s office, filed as exhibits.“The proposed changes will decrease unnecessary coroner investigations and will result in savings of about ($900,000 annually) starting in 2013-14,” stated a business case from the coroner’s office. The documents showed that there were 927 death investigations of long-term care residents in 2015, compared to 2,971 in 2011.Between 8 and 9 per cent of death investigations in long-term care homes result in post mortems, Huyer said. That compares to 40 per cent of all deaths investigated.Wettlaufer, 51, pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, four counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault. She checked herself into a mental health hospital in 2016 and confessed to carrying out the crimes.The ...
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