CUPE rallies for PRHC workers
No change in local COVID-19 numbers, steady at 73 since Sunday
About 50 hospital staff rallied outside Peterborough Regional Health Centre (PRHC) on Thursday to decry the ineligibility of some PRHC workers for the province’s pandemic pay premium.
“We’re all health-care workers — yet some have been acknowledged, and some have been extremely slighted,” said Laurie Hatton, a cook and a union leader at the hospital.
Hatton is the president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 1943, which represents about 700 workers at the hospital.
She’s eligible for the pay premium of $4 more hourly, and the provincial government has indicated it may expand the program to include yet more hospital staff. But Hatton says about a third of the workers in her local — maintenance workers, clerks and some dietary workers, for instance — still don’t qualify for the extra pay.
That’s more than 200 workers at PRHC, and Hatton doesn’t think Premier Doug Ford ought to have “hand-picked” certain health-care workers to receive extra pay and ignored others. “If the Ford government wants to thank us, they need to thank all of us,” she said.
Hatton also said the provincial government ought to find a way to have N95 respirator masks available to all hospital workers, rather than procedure masks.
Meanwhile, there’s a worldwide shortage of the N95 respirator masks, and it’s been challenging for the provincial and federal government to buy them.
Still, Hatton says the province could help manufacturers retool to make them in Ontario.
In terms of extra pay, the provincial government has afforded the premium to staff at longterm-care homes, retirement homes, emergency shelters and some hospital staff, and expanded the list lately to also include paramedics and public health nurses.
Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott has said the government is in discussions with other professional groups not included in the pay premium program with a view to including them too, The Canadian Press reported. Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith was not available for comment on Thursday.
Local COVID-19 cases
There were still 73 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Peterborough Public Health (PPH) jurisdiction late Thursday, the same as on Wednesday.
Sixty-seven of those people have recovered (the same as on Wednesday). There have been two deaths from COVID-19 in the PPH jurisdiction.
The jurisdiction covers the city and County of Peterborough, as well as Hiawatha and Curve Lake First Nations.
About 6,250 people had been tested for COVID-19 in this area as of late Thursday, up from about 5,600 on Wednesday.
There remained two outbreaks in the city on Thursday: one at St. Joseph’s at Fleming long-term-care home that Public Health Ontario says involves fewer than five staff members, and another at Kawartha Heights Retirement Living in the city’s west end (which involved one asymptomatic staff member.)