Long-term care facility workers ask for more staffing

Health care workers with Mine Mill Local 598/Unifor picketed Thursday for the province to impose minimum staffing standards in long-term care facilities.

Jennifer Foslett, a personal support worker at St. Gabriel's Villa, a 128-bed long-term care home in Chelmsford, said they do not have enough staff to provide residents the best level of care possible.

To get residents ready for breakfast, for example, she said she only has around 11 minutes to bring each of her clients the toilet, wash them, brush their teeth and dress them.

“You feel horrible when you can't give them the time that they deserve and require,” Foslett said.

Mine Mill Local 598 president Anne-Marie MacInnis said long-term care facilities are cutting corners, and residents are falling through the cracks.

The union has asked for residents to receive a minimum of four hours of care each day.

St. Gabriel's Villa was able to hire 2.4 more full-time equivalent personal care assistants last summer thanks to a change in its case mix index – a classification system used to determine the allocation of financial resources to long-term care homes across the province from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.

Deb Tveit, assistant to Jerry Dias, Unifor's national president, said the health care workers the union represents are also underpaid.

“There have been measures done through austerity over the previous two years where they have taken wage freezes to help the government get through some hard times,” she said. “It's a hard sell for us when people in the management side get increases and the workers are expected to take very low wages.”

Health care workers at St. Gabriel's Villa have been without a contract for more than a year.