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PSWs feel they're fighting a losing battle

Many long-term care facilities facing a shortage of personal support workers
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Staff shortages, tough working conditions, and low paying job have PSWs frustrated as they fight an uphill battle. (File)

Everyone has the occasional bad day at work, but they have nothing on Nancy Rodrigue. She has been struck, almost had her wrist broken, had her hair pulled, been punched and kicked and subjected to full-out attacks, and had feces flung in her face during her eight-hour shifts.

Violence is almost a given in her job as a personal support worker at Villa St. Gabriel Villa in Chelmsford, as it is for PSWs working in hospitals, other long-term care homes and the community. Rodrigue, 50, has 13 years as a PSW, six of them at St. Gabe’s. Her job is to provide basic, intimate care to people who are old, frail and arguably at the most vulnerable point in their lives.

It’s work that often pays less than $20 an hour and which many PSWs, most of them women, are leaving -- or just not entering -- in droves.

Still, for Rodrigue, caring for the elderly is a labour of love. She took care of her father-in-law, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, for more than 20 years. The last 10 were particularly difficult, she said in an interview at her home in Chelmsford.

Her father-in-law’s condition worsened in that decade and Rodrigue suffered a health crisis of her own. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and was undergoing treatment, but continued to work full-time.

She considered those final days with her father-in-law precious. “It made me want to just take care of the elderly,” said Rodrigue.

She is still battling breast cancer and is determined to beat it, but there is another challenge she faces every day. It is the shortage of personal support workers at the long-term care home she works at and throughout the sector.

“It feels like we’re losing the battle. We’re fighting a losing battle,” said Rodrigue of the chronic shortage of PSWs at St. Gabe’s and elsewhere.

At Villa St. Gabriel Villa, 10 to 20 per cent of the postings for PSWs remain unfilled. At St. Joseph’s Villa the shortage is 20 to 30 per cent in terms of posting, said Jo-Anne Palkovits, president and chief executive officer of both residences, which are owned and operated by St. Joseph’s Health Centre.

The PSW shortage has been growing, both in long-term care residences and in the community, for the last two years, said Palkovits. She and others have been working with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and the North East Local Integration Network to find creative ways to address the issue.

Many people, including those with the Health ministry, were not aware of the situation some are calling a crisis until Palkovits and others set out to raise awareness. Mine Mill Local 598/Unifor represents PSWs at four of the seven long-term care homes in the city, and the union has been mobilizing PSWs to demand better wages and better working conditions in what are becoming more and more difficult workplaces.

The starting wage for a PSW at St. Gabe’s and St. Joe’s is $18.50 an hour and the highest wage is in the $21-an-hour range. PSWs at city-owned Pioneer Manor make a few dollars more an hour and PSWs at Health Sciences North make more than that.

Dr. Peter Zalan, a semi-retired anesthesiologist, has long worked to address challenges in the health care system in Sudbury, both at the hospital and the community level. PSWs are vital to Ontario’s health care system at the same time the job is becoming less and less attractive to many people.

Zalan said the drawbacks to the job are money and respect. Palkovits can see those being “absolutely important.”

Being a PSW is a tough job, she said. “Our PSWs who work here are so dedicated, they’re so committed to our residents and they do an amazing job.”

Melissa Wood is unit chair for Mine Mill Local 598/Unifor at Villa St. Gabriel Villa. Wood is a cook in the dietary department but knows several PSWs who have left to work for Canada Revenue Agency, which recently was on a hiring spree. 

As well as larger pay cheques, PSWs are leaving because of caregiver burnout, said Wood.

Even dedicated PSWs like Rodrigue are ready to trade up to better paying jobs. She applied to the CRA but wasn’t hired because the agency requires a high school diploma and did not accept her high school equivalency as such.

Palkovits said she has gone as far as visiting the officer of the minister of Health and Long-Term Care to press for solutions to the PSW shortage. St. Joseph’s Villa has teamed up with the North East LHIN and College Boreal to offer a pilot program to get people certified as PSWs. The Long Term Care Act requires PSWs be certified to work in LTC homes, but not in the community.

The partners in the pilot identified unemployed health care workers such as those in developmental services, rehabilitation and physiotherapy assistants, paramedics, registered nurses and registered practical nurses to sign up for the program. They are invited to receive fast-track training at no cost, and be paid for the hours it takes, to obtain their PSW equivalency.

“This is a solution for the entire Northeast because the whole Northeast is struggling and, in fact, the province,” said Palkovits.

Rodrigue is not counting on health professionals, who are more highly paid than personal support workers, enrolling for PSW certification. If they do because they are out of work, they are bound to leave the lower-paying jobs as soon as something in their field opens up.

“Who in their right mind is going to go to school as a paramedic and become a PSW?” Rodrigue wants to know.

Roma Smith is co-chair of the Grand Family Council of the City of Greater Sudbury, a group comprised of representatives of family councils at all seven long-term care homes in Sudbury. As far as the grand family council is concerned, the PSW crisis should be high on the list of priorities for all candidates in the June 7 provincial election.

Smith wrote a letter to Sudbury Liberal MPP Glenn Thibeault last month, asking him to take the group’s concerns to Health Minister Dr. Helena Jaczek. LTC homes are faced “with continuous and rising staff shortages,” Smith wrote Thibeault. PSWs are working understaffed, PSW job postings are not being filled, and fewer and fewer people are enrolling in PSW courses offered at learning institutions in Sudbury.

Thibeault replied to Smith citing recent funding for related programs including money to provide four hours of care a day to residents in long-term care as measures to address the PSW shortage. Not surprisingly, Rodrigue and Wood are in favour of increasing the hours of care provided at LTC homes, a measure Ontario New Democrats have been calling for for years. They just don’t know where workers will be found to staff the positions needed to offer that level of care.

The grand council will hold two meetings, in Sudbury and Nickel Belt ridings, to address its concerns about the shortage of PSWs. The Sudbury meeting will be held May 15 at 7 p.m. at Finlandia. Neither Progressive Conservative candidate Troy Crowder nor Thibeault has committed to attending.

The Nickel Belt meeting will be held May 24 at 7 p.m. at the Elizabeth Centre in Val Caron.

Meanwhile, the North East LHIN is working to develop personal support worker capacity throughout the region, in long-term care and in the community, and in mental health and addictions.

The PSW shortage is being felt throughout the province, said the LHIN in a written statement. Some of the initiatives it is undertaking are using RPNs rather than PSWs to provide service to high-needs patients and holding 15 PSW recruitment fairs in the Northeast in March 2018.

When asked what it would take to make her job easier, Rodrigue is quick to reply. “More staffing, it’s not about money, and having management back us up.”

Carol Mulligan is an award-winning reporter and one of Greater Sudbury’s most experienced journalists.


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