WOODSTOCK, ONT.—For Jon Matheson, fully coming to terms with his mother’s murder remains somewhere in the distance, a place he’s not sure he’ll ever get to. But today, at least, he feels he got a little closer.“I got some closure, I guess,” he said, after the release of a report on how to prevent a repeat of Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s nursing home murder spree, which included the killing of Matheson’s mother, Helen.“You get more closure each time something good comes out of it, and if the good keeps happening, it gets easier to deal with,” he said.The good Matheson felt Wednesday was the result of a four-volume report calling for sweeping changes to fix the “systemic vulnerabilities” that allowed Wettlaufer, a registered nurse, to kill nine people in two southwestern Ontario nursing homes between 2007 and 2016. Her crimes stopped only when she decided, unprompted, to turn herself in and confess.The report’s release was followed by Ontario’s minister of long-term care, Merrilee Fullerton, promising “new funding to address the recommendations.”“We are taking immediate action,” she told the families of victims gathered at a local hotel to read the report. “We will spend the next year acting on what we heard today.”She didn’t reveal how much new funding would be provided, which recommendations the provincial government would adopt or when they would be implemented.Her most concrete commitment was to table a study by this time next year into how many extra registered nurses and staff are needed in nursing homes to keep residents safe — a recommendation contained in the report. The law currently requires one registered nurse on site at all times, a number the Ontario Nurses’ Association has long described as grossly insufficient.Matheson is willing to give the government some months to act, and will be keeping watch.“The biggest t ...
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