YU CARE sponsored project 'COVID in the House of Old' featured in Y-FILE article

charnaw — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 13:37:41 +0000

Please click here to read Y-FILE article

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News

Alice — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 19:07:17 +0000

YU CARE Director Dr. Tamara Daly has written an article in 'The Conversation' on Ontario's for profit surgical centres Click Here to read the article:

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Temporary agency workers have long been a crutch for a care system in crisis, experts say. Now, they are exempt from new COVID-19 health directives

Tue, 12 May 2020 13:38:44 +0000

By Work and Wealth Reporter. Sun., April 19, 2020

Long before the pandemic hit, “working short” was a chronic problem for personal support worker Febe Jimenez.

Staff were overloaded on a good day at her Hamilton-area retirement home; a single worker’s absence could throw an already tenuous care system built on low pay and long hours into disarray. For temporary relief, she says, help was habitually drafted in from three separate staffing agencies: one for nurses, one for night shift, and one for day shift.

“Before this happened, we were going through agencies like crazy,” Jimenez said.

A new directive issued by the province this week limits the movement of health-care workers between facilities in a bid to contain the devastating spread of in nursing homes. But the directive does not apply to agency workers, who earn their living floating from home to home.

It’s an exemption critics call a health risk — and a sign.

“It shows just how desperate the Ontario government is to adequately staff these long-term care facilities,” said Candace Rennick, secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and a long-time nursing home worker.

“We know there is a complete staffing crisis with respect to shortages and retention and recruitment. They are so reliant on this temporary agency contract work that they need to exempt them from a fundamental order to keep people safe.”

In a statement to the Star, a spokesperson for Minister of Long Term Care Merrilee Fullerton said the order did not apply to “agency workers or other critical contract staff” in order to “ensure a steady supply of staff available to work on an emergency basis in long-term care homes.”

“To ensure the safety of long-term care residents, these workers are subject to ‘active screening’ direction set out in a directive by the Chief Medical Officer of Health, which requires a rigorous screening process before being permitted entry into a long-term care home,” the statement said.

Even for directly-hired personal support workers, poor pay has long meant juggling multiple jobs at different homes, says Sharlene Stewart, president of Services Employees International Union Healthcare.

“Workers absolutely want one full-time job. But when you pay them so poorly … you have to work two jobs to barely make a living,” she said.

In light of the pandemic, the government has said these workers can pick one employer and take job-protected leaves of absence from others to comply with new directives.The province has also said it “encourages” long-term-care employers to offer full-time hours to part-time workers.

But the reliance on agencies can pose a risk to residents, caused in part by “the lack of familiarity and the discontinuity in care,” said Laxer. In the midst of a pandemic, “precarious arrangements are leading to what are probably very problematic levels of traffic under these circumstances,” she added.

The model can also pose risks to workers, who often rely heavily on their knowledge of a particular home and its residents to keep themselves safe on the job, said Armstrong.

“Especially in these times, you want that support,” she said.

It’s an issue that was brought to Workforce Planning for Sudbury & Manitoulin head Reggie Caverson’s attention around two years ago — by the head of a private staffing agency.

“They said, ‘do you have any idea how many shifts are being missed at our local long-term care homes?’” Caverson recalls.

“Obviously, they were a private staffing agency so it was a fairly lucrative business for them. But they were very, very concerned about the fact that there were so many shifts that were being missed.”

Caverson and her team investigated, speaking to staffing agencies, nursing homes, and — most importantly — workers themselves.

“Nothing is worse than our field than going into agencies and they’re saying, ‘there’s nothing wrong here.’ But we’re hearing from the workers saying, ‘oh, there’s something really wrong here.’ And that’s exactly what has happened,” said Caverson.

The resulting report, published last year, found that personal support workers in the area were evenly split between full-time and part-time, with 75 per cent earning $20 or less an hour. The report also found that around a third reported working for an employment agency.

Existing research on temporary agency work has long shown that it is often riskier and lower-paid than a permanent job. But while the model poses safety issues in the health care sector too, the concerns around pay sometimes differ, said Caverson.

Canadian cases and deaths by province/territory

Data current as of May 11.This chart is updated daily using data from the Government of Canada Health Infobase website which may not match the data provided by other agencies.

Ontario

British Columbia

Quebec

Alberta

Saskatchewan

Manitoba

New Brunswick

Newfoundland and Labrador

Nova Scotia

Prince Edward Island

Yukon

Northwest Territories

600↑ new cases5004003002001000Jan 31May 11Ontario - pop. 14,711,827308 new cases on May 11.20,000↑ total cases15,00010,0005,0000Jan 31May 1120,546 cases and 1,669 deaths total1,66920,546

SOURCE: THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA HEALTH INFOBASE, STATISTICS CANADA POPULATION ESTIMATES Q1 2020

In some cases, agency workers “get emergency pay to get in there earlier and faster, so they’re paid much better than the current PSWs and have a lot more flexibility,” she noted. Sometimes, workers may even prefer agency work because permanent positions are so demanding, she added.

“How do you fix that? You fix that by improving conditions,” said Armstrong.

And while the rationale behind lean staffing may be low labour costs, Caverson said the end result may be exactly the opposite.

“I talked to some of the directors up here from the long-term-care homes, and (agencies) charge them an arm and a leg for one of these staff members to come in,” she said.

“The local health integration network … had charts and everything showing how in debt they were now because it had to pay for all these private staffing people to come in.”

But the scale of the problem remains quantify, even amid a crisis where hard numbers would come in handy, said Laxner. Apart from research efforts like the ones undertaken by Caverson, low-wage care workers are often invisible in workforce data.

“The data gets very, very murky especially the more tenuous the employment relationship,” Laxer said.

Long-term care facilities, for example, report “full-time equivalents” to represent their staffing numbers, which “lumps together all the workers so that it’s impossible to gauge who was working full-time, part time, temporary or agency,” she said.

“I would argue that that’s really important because the employment relationship is a key indicator of the quality of care,” she said.

Now, with capacity stretched more than ever amid a crisis, the government’s ability to restrict mobility — long an unwelcome necessity for many workers — is limited by problems of its own making, said Laxer.

“It was very clear that this model of having people come in and out of facilities, or any environment in which they’re providing care, poses a tremendous risk if there is some kind of outbreak of any kind of infectious disease. That was known,” she said.

“It’s heartbreaking and astonishing that it wasn’t addressed sooner.”

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YU-CARE Researchers at the Global Carework Summit in Toronto

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 17:42:03 +0000

From June 9-11th, researchers from around the world involved in the study of care work engaged together for the annual Global Carework Summit. This year, the event was held in the lecture halls of the Hart House at the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus.

Several Faculty members and graduate students attended and presented at the event, including Dr. Pat Armstrong, who delivered the well-received keynote address The Feminization of the Care Labor Force on the second evening.

Below are abbreviated abstracts of some of the research involving care work and residential care research presented by YU-CARE members and affiliates:

Tamara Daly, 91��ɫ, “Temporal Tensions in Care Work.”

This paper comparatively explores the micro-politics of time as it is experienced in front-line nursing home care work — in Ontario, Canada, New South Wales, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand — and set within a macro-politics of time that variously employs NPM tools. .

Kate Laxer, 91��ɫ, Tamara Daly, 91��ɫ “The Formal Labour Force in Long-term Residential Care in Canada: Preliminary Analysis of New Survey Data on Gender, Work Organization and Working Conditions.”

In 2006, our team conducted the Long-term Care Workers’ Survey (LTC-WS) to better understand the work of Canada’s LTRC labour force and to compare conditions in Canada with Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland). This paper presents preliminary analysis of data from a new, expanded LTC-WS. .

Vasuki Shanmuganathan, 91��ɫ, “Quality, Cultural Care, and Labour in Canadian Long-Term Care Settings.”

This paper will explore the interconnectedness of culture, care, and quality and use examples of innovations in Canadian long-term care settings. In employing data gathered using rapid side-switching ethnography from site visits to Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and Nova Scotia, this paper will advance discussions on cultural care, quality, and labour. .

Jacqueline Choiniere, 91��ɫ, Ruth Lowndes, 91��ɫ, “Tensions for Nurses in Long-term Residential Care.”

We describe a German apprenticeship model that allowed for training and higher staffing levels. In the Canadian context, we draw on a promising Manitoba example, where staff were trained on the equipment they use for residents, a form of training that facilitated building of experiential insight and empathy for the residents and their positions as care recipients. .

For an event program and more about how to become involved in the next Carework Summit, visit the .

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