Working in long-term care by day, sleeping in a shelter at night
The economic realities of life as a personal support worker
OTTAWA - When two women living in an Ottawa homeless shelter tested positive for COVID-19 last spring causing an outbreak, Dr. Jeff Turnbull couldn’t understand how they had become infected.
But then he learned that, although they slept at the shelter each night, the homeless women worked as personal support workers during the day in long-term care homes.
“It turns out that they live in a shelter, but they work outside of the shelter. They just can’t earn enough money to afford Ottawa’s rental circumstances,” Turnbull, the medical director of Inner City Health, told Ontario’s Long Term Care Commission last month.
“And where do they work? Long-term care. And so they brought COVID from a long-term care facility into the shelters where we had an outbreak.”
The commission has heard hundreds of hours of testimony — much of it shocking — since it was launched last fall to investigate the spread of COVID-19 in Ontario’s long-term care homes. But Turnbull’s revelation about the reality of trying to live on a personal support worker’s wages could be the most stunning.
“It was stupid of me,” he told the commission of his failure to initially understand that some long-term care workers would not earn enough to afford rent. “I just didn’t think that would be a likely possibility — of people working outside and exposing themselves and bringing COVID in that way.”
Those workers were far from the only ones sleeping in Ottawa homeless shelters by night and working in longterm care homes and elsewhere during the day.
In fact there are so many precarious workers — including PSWs — living in the city’s shelter system, that some of them are now being housed at the COVID-19 isolation centre set up in a hotel in Ottawa for people who need to isolate but don’t have room to do so safely at home, said Wendy Muckle, executive director of Inner City Health, which provides healthcare for the city’s homeless population.
The homeless workers are not at the isolation centre because they have tested positive or come in contact with someone with COVID-19, but because they have nowhere else to go. Some homeless workers, who remained in shelters, were cohorted together in order to minimize contact with others.
Muckle said there are at least 25 people living in homeless shelters in Ottawa who work — many of them in long-term care homes. The actual number is likely much higher, she said, because people staying in shelters are often hesitant to admit they have jobs.
“I know it was very shocking to a lot of people that we had so many people in that circumstance.”