Home care company looking to qualified employees

BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN

Bayshore Home Health is looking to hire about 30 new workers in the region to meet the increasing demand for home care.

The company has the home care contract for the North East Community Care Access Centre in Greater Sudbury and Manitoulim.

Bayshore is hosting a job fair geared to registered nurses, registered practical nurses and personal support workers Jan. 22 from 12 to 8 pm at the Holiday Inn on Regent St.

“We've been constantly posting jobs on the Internet and in the newspaper, but we just haven't been able to attract that volume that we need,” says Jeff Sampson, area director for Bayshore.

“We were looking for a way to do that with the manpower that we had and see as many people as we could, so we decided to go with a job fair I know that there's qualified people out there. I've been getting calls all week.”

Sampson says his 400 workers are swamped with clients because patients are being sent home earlier from the hospital because of overcrowding, and need home care for longer periods of time.

The population is also aging, which means more people have health conditions that require home care, he says.

There is also a shortage of workers across the entire health care system right now, says Sampson. He says he hopes there are qualified people in the Greater Sudbury region who are unhappy with their current job and would like to work for his company.

Although Bayshore workers only get paid $12 to $15 an hour, on average, Sampson says offering higher wages to attract more employees is not a stable strategy.

“It's not because I don't think they deserve more for their work, because they do, but I think it's more than that. Yeah, they do need an increase in pay, but as an employer and a company, I think we need to be looking beyond that pay scale to other ideas are going to benefit employees,” he says.

“Our ability is limited by the funding sources we have, and we can definitely pay the workers more, but if that's the strategy that every company is going with, then we're all trying to draw from the same pool and attract the same worker with the dollar.”

The government needs to provide more funding to post-secondary institutions to train more registered nurses, registered practical nurses and personal support workers, he says.“Post-secondary programs are definitely going to benefit from the need and demand we have.”

Bayshore has also been training family members to change dressings and give injections to ease pressure on their employees, he says.

For more information about working for Bayshore, phone Sampson at 523-6668.