Funding can curb care home violence: union

Warning of a ‘state of crisis,’ CUPE holds rally in support of private member’s bill

The union representing nurses and long-term-care workers at Ottawa’s 17 facilities says “many tragic stories” could be avoided if Ontario increased its funding.

CUPE staged a rally at the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre on Thursday, urging support for Bill 33, a private member’s bill that calls for higher levels of daily resident care, along with at least four hours of daily hands-on care.

A CUPE news release referenced the murders of eight elderly residents in Woodstock and London, Ont., and the recent homicide of a 72-year-old resident, allegedly at the hands of another resident, calling the cases “a tragic symptom of a care system in a state of crisis.”

The union said a coroner’s inquest eight years ago into a similar 2005 incident made 85 recommendations for improving the quality of care, but said “many of these recommendations have still not been acted on.”

Bonnie Soucie, a registered practical nurse at the Perley and Rideau centre, said, “We’re understaffed throughout the whole facility.

“It’s not only in nursing, but in housecleaning, maintenance — just trying to manage the expectations of the services we’re supposed to be providing to longterm-care residents, but there’s not enough time to do the work that’s expected of us,” she added. “So the residents end up suffering and having to do with less.”

Soucie said front-line staff often bear the brunt of violent episodes involving residents with dementia or who display aggressive behaviour toward staff or fellow residents.

According to data cited by the union, 73 per cent of long-termcare residents suffer from some form of dementia, and an internal CUPE survey found that 81 per cent of nursing home workers had dealt with resident-on-resident violence.

“It’s no different than any other long-term-care facility in Ottawa,” Soucie said. “We have 17 of them and they’re all pretty well underfunded and understaffed. Everybody has a lot of information, but there doesn’t seem to be anything done.

“So if we run into problems or need more staff on the floors, they just can’t provide them because there’s no funding.”

The CUPE awareness campaign is named Time to Care, after the private member’s bill, which is set for a second reading in September.

The campaign calls for an increase in funding and an amendment to the Long-Term Care Homes Act that would legislate a minimum standard of four hours care per resident per day.

The union is also urging the province to fund specialized facilities, with specially trained staff, for residents with cognitive impairments who have been assessed as aggressive.

Michael Hurley, president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, said staffing and funding levels are lower in Ontario than in the rest of the country, while the province’s long-termcare patient population is older and sicker than it was a decade ago.

Data provided by CUPE say Ontario’s annual funding per longterm-care bed is $43,970, compared to an average of $52,185 for the rest of Canada. Ontario residents get an average of 3.15 hours of daily hands-on care, compared with an average of 3.67 hours per day in other provinces, according to the data.

A spokesman said the ministry could not verify the accuracy of those figures by press time.

Hurley said the numbers reflect the most recently available data provided by the Canadian Institute for Health Care Information.

“Ontario is way below other provinces — it averages out to 45 extra minutes per day for every resident, and that would mean a whole world to them,” Soucie said.

“We feel like we’re scrambling from bedside to bedside to get all the work done, but it’s the people living here who are suffering. They are the vulnerable, and a lot of times they have no voices, so we’re their voice.

“This is not about the union or the employer — this is about the residents and the care and assistance they need with the proper funding to do so.”