PSWs still entirely ungoverned
They do the most intimate of health-care jobs with the most vulnerable citizens: the elderly, the sick, the mentally ill, the disabled.
If your old, sick dad needs a diaper change, it’s likely a personal support worker (PSW) who will do it. If your aging aunt needs help to go to the toilet, guess who will be helping her there. If your crabby, frightened mother has stopped eating, it’s a PSW who may try to convince her, and if she throws up after a few bites, it’s the same woman who will clean her up.
For such glamorous work, PSWs in Ontario earn the princely sum of between $13.75 (private home care) to $19 an hour (for those working for publicly funded home care agencies): They really are the heavy lifters in health care.
Yet PSWs remain entirely ungoverned, unlike just about every other healthcare sector, and in Ontario, they’ve been begging the government in vain for years for the tools to make themselves accountable.
Miranda Ferrier, the firebrand president of the Ontario Personal Support Workers Association and a PSW herself, has been the one doing much of the begging for, as she puts it, “my people and the people in my people’s care.”
The public hears about PSWs mostly with bad news, such as the recent case in Ottawa, where a PSW named Jie Xiao pleaded guilty to assault for an incident at a retirement home where he delivered 11 punches to an 89-year-old man with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Then there’s the case of Soja Zadeh, a PSW who in May pleaded guilty to a single count of assault — for slapping an elderly patient on her buttocks — in a sweet plea deal that saw a slew of sexual assault charges against him withdrawn, mostly, it appears, because the complainants were deemed too old or ill to testify.
He received a conditional sentence, three years’ probation, plus four days he spent in custody.
What is outrageous is that while Zadeh was fired by Mackenzie Health Hospital in Richmond Hill after the hospital wrote Eva Shirdan to tell her that her mother Sonja had been assaulted (the letter called it “an episode of inappropriate behaviour”), the hospital didn’t report the incident to police.
(The hospital says its policy then was to not make police reports unless the patient wanted to do so. Now it says it does.)
As a result, Zadeh was hired by a non-profit organization to work with seniors in a neighbouring city; there, he was charged with assaulting two elderly women in February of 2016.
As Ferrier said in a phone interview Tuesday, “Who was making sure this guy was not working again?”
This is where it all gets very curious: Why on earth would a government, least of all one that routinely portrays itself as the softhearted defender of the vulnerable, not embrace the notion of proper governance for front-line health-care workers?
Yet consistently, when it comes to protecting old people, this government has a history of dragging its feet.
For years, coroner’s juries and fire officials preached the life-saving merits of automatic sprinklers in what are called vulnerable occupancies.
But it was only in 2013, after fire after fire kept killing residents in such places, that Ontario finally brought in legislation to make sprinklers mandatory in all retirement and nursing homes and residences for the disabled.
Give the government credit: It may have acted too slowly but still it was the first province in Canada to do so.
Ditto PSWs. In its most recent budget this spring, Ontario promised to reintroduce its expensive (about $7-million) failed registry for PSWs and announced it would be working with the Service International Employees Union, or SEIU Healthcare as it’s known, to create a training program and facility for PSWs.
That’s all lovely, but the failed registry was a disaster and did nothing for public safety, the province’s colleges already run successful programs for PSWs, and SEIU Healthcare just happens to have cosy ties to the Liberal Party of Ontario.
The party’s recently resigned president, Michael Spitale, who left in July about two months after the budget came down, is by chance the director of government relations for SEIU. And there’s another union, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which has PSW members and whose president, Smokey Thomas, is suspicious of the “shady inside relationships” between the party and SEIU Healthcare.
No one knows for sure how many PSWs there are in Ontario, precisely because the field is so unregulated. Miranda Ferrier guesses there are about 135,000.
About 30,000 belong to her association, and every one of them has to have an enhanced criminal record check and local police check — every year — and the association has in place a code of ethics, standards of practice and ongoing education.
If these things were made mandatory, if the association were a regulatory body, the other 105,000 PSWs would have to be similarly checked out and there would be some accountability.
At the moment, the association is in the midst of a campaign encouraging PSWs to report abuse: No wonder the government doesn’t want governance. That sort of thing can spread.
As Eva Shirdan said, “For me, it’s my mother. But it’s much bigger than my mother.”