A $19-million settlement has been reached for patients mistreated in one of the last veterans' hospital in Canada, says Blacklock's Reporter..A judge formally closed a successful class action case to compensate patients at Ste. Anne’s Hospital near Montréal, one of 18 hospitals that had been run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. .Patients, including survivors of the Second World War and Korea, had complained of poor care when the facility was transferred to provincial management in 2016..“The bills for legal counsel, the administrator and the investigator retained by the administrator have been paid,” wrote the court. .Of 505 patients known to have lived at Ste. Anne’s, 262 submitted claims for compensation..Lawyers told the court they could not find any trace of 119 former patients or their survivors..The lead plaintiff died in 2021..Evidence in the Ste. Anne’s case included old Senate reports that demanded minimum standards of care for aging soldiers, sailors and air crew..A 1998 report said the Department of Veterans Affairs “must meet the needs of veterans to the same or higher degree” when hospitals were transferred to local authorities..A 1999 report warned that “staff must come to understand the special medical conditions” of veterans..Federal lawyers in the Ste. Anne’s case had fought to block admissibility of the Senate reports prior to settling all claims..“This case seems unique,” Justice Johanne Brodeur of Québec Superior Court wrote at the time..The reports proved the department was “aware of the problem of the transfer of a health facility to provincial authorities,” the court was told..The Department of Veterans Affairs spends $237 million annually on long-term care. Staff in a 2019 report acknowledged “growing waiting lists” for veterans in their 80s and 90s..Federally-run hospitals for veterans dated from a Military Hospitals Commission that opened the first of 50 facilities in 1916 in Winnipeg, Deer Lodge. First World War wounded totaled 172,950..The country’s largest hospital for veterans, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre of Toronto, currently has some 300 patients including World War Two veterans.
