It’s been more than a year since 81-year-old Toronto nursing home resident Phillip Kennedy suffered a leg wound so deep and wide it looked as if he had been sliced open by an axe.His daughter, Kathleen Kennedy, said the home has never told her family how Phillip was injured, even though it happened in the middle of the day, in a licensed Ontario long-term care facility busy with nurses and personal support workers.When Phillip was injured — three days after moving in — nobody from Hawthorne Place Care Centre could, or would, say how it happened. A provincial ministry of health inspector spent six days investigating but found no explanation for the cause of the injury. Phillip died in hospital three weeks later. Kathleen said his death report cited end-stage heart disease and kidney failure.“If they had just said to me, ‘you know what, we dropped him,’ or even, ‘you know what, he was hit with an axe, we are sorry and this is what we’ve done to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else,’ I would have accepted it. But there was none of that. Nothing,” Kathleen said.“It is very unsettling.”After Phillip was injured, on Oct. 28, 2017, the inspector interviewed at least eight employees, including the home’s administrator, physiotherapist and personal support workers. While the inspector’s final report, provided to the Star by Phillip’s family, didn’t find conclusive answers, it detailed four violations, including the “abuse and neglect” that led to the firing of five workers, along with unsafe practices while moving him from sitting to standing and from chair to bed.Last week, a spokesperson for Hawthorne Place Care Centre told the Star that its internal probe, including the work of an outside investigator, found that Phillip’s injury was likely the result of a staff error. “All indications are that the injury was unintentional — the re ...
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