Residents, staff wouldn’t benefit from privatized manor - Mick Lowe

The sale of Pioneer Manor is an idea whose time has come — and should go — and soon, once and for all.
That’s the view from here — the Manor itself — where I’ve lived for the past year, following a stroke that has left me disabled since May, 2008.

The overwhelming consensus among residents and staff alike who I’ve consulted on this issue—something no one at city hall thought to do, by the way—is that the Manor is just fine, and should be left alone.

In fact, this place is more than just fine.

It is a vibrant, very well-managed, bilingual, heavily-unionized institution where staff morale is high, (staff here are the best paid of any nursing home in the city) turnover is low, continuity of care is consequently high, and the level of resident-centered care, provided by a collegial, experienced staff, is superb.

A privatized Manor is unlikely to maintain this feat, according to a study published in January by the Montreal-based Institute for Research in Public Policy.

“Their main conclusion is that for-profit facilities are likely to produce inferior outcomes,” the report notes, reviewing a spate of new U.S. and Canadian studies comparing public and for-profit seniors’ care models.

Any would-be private operator would be seeking to profit—but room rental rates are set province-wide by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care. The results are predictable. According to the study “one of the principal mechanisms for generating profit is reducing staffing levels, which results in inferior quality of care.”

Why expose our community’s vulnerable seniors and disabled to such a risk? At the Manor we have nowhere to go but down.

Any successful would-be bidder on the Manor should know they are apt to inherit a disgruntled workforce within the context of Greater Sudbury’s famously militant, and aggressively unionized workforce, to say nothing of 433 spunky Sudbury seniors who can be expected to grow downright cranky at the first hint of any care reduction stemming from said acquisition.

And what of the argument that the city-subsidized Manor is unfair to competitors and antithetical to our new-found mantra that Sudbury is “open for business?”

Well, boo-hoo, but I happen to put my health, and that of my fellow 432 Manor residents, first.
I close with the following heartfelt words from one anonymous but entirely typical Manor health care aide: “These are the people who built the city. We can’t short-change them now . . . It’d be like turning granny out into the street, and you just can’t do that. . .”

“We’re lucky to be here.” (You’d be surprised how often I hear this sentiment from residents and staff alike.) “We have good jobs . . . If my truck tire ain’t flat, don’t try to put air into it!”

Mick Lowe is the president of the Pioneer Manor Residents’ Council and a former Northern Life editor and columnist.

Posted by Vivian Scinto