CUPE Ontario’s Health Care Workers Coordinating Committee, HCWCC, held a round table discussion with MPPs at Queen’s Park today. The discussions focused on the challenges facing long-term care and retirement home workers in Ontario.
The Covid-19 pandemic shone a light on Ontario’s long-term care and retirement home sector in a way that nothing else was able to before. The clear pitfalls of understaffing, lack of necessary resources, and health and safety concerns which unions have been trying to warn against for years, contributed to the preventable deaths of thousands of Ontario seniors. The interim recommendations from Ontario’s long-term care COVID-19 commission strongly suggest that the conditions of work for staff are closely tied to the conditions of care for residents. In response, the provincial government has made overtures to increase investments in the sector.
Some of these supports, like the 4 hour per day minimum standard for care, are steps in the right direction being held back by lack of funding and other essential resources. Others, such as the creation of the Health and Supportive Care Providers Oversight Authority, HSCPOA, are going to act as a hinderance to reaching staffing objectives in the sector. Worse still, we see more public funding landing in the hands of private sector providers whose interests are more concerned with turning a profit than providing the level of care our seniors deserve.
Increases in private delivery in long-term care and retirement homes in Ontario are leading to worsening healthcare outcomes, eroding working conditions, and increases in health and safety related issues in our sector. Government programs directed at addressing some of these issues often miss the mark, and in some cases pose additional barriers to workers in the field. Lawmakers should be working with unions, workers, and other relevant stakeholders when developing programs meant to tackle these issues, and work to expand and invest in public delivery services to ensure the highest level of support for seniors and workers alike.
The HCWCC will be out in communities throughout the summer collecting signatures for the support our care campaign, aimed at producing worker-led solutions to the challenges in the long-term care and retirement home sector.