Firing front-line workers no recruitment solution

Every day, there is amazing care being provided to seniors, but there is no question that the system is fragmented and starved of resources.

And Postmedia’s weeklong series, Navigating Seniors’ Care, did an excellent job highlighting the exceptional efforts of care providers, families and seniors themselves to improve caring conditions in a system that is “underfunded and problem-plagued.”

On a positive note, the provincial government is acting on its promise to improve staffing levels in residential care facilities — a move that will improve the quality of care and make work safer in a sector where injury rates are nearly eight times the provincial average.

The Hospital Employees’ Union campaigns for higher staffing levels. That’s because care aides and other HEU members who work in seniors’ care consistently identify workload as their number 1 challenge to providing compassionate, quality care.

For these workers, more staff means more opportunities to provide proper, unrushed care — or even to just find time to talk to a resident who is anxious or afraid.

But, as your series points out, recruiting care staff is challenging and requires careful planning. Significant investments in education and training will be needed in order to meet the government’s plan for a net increase in the number of care aides and other residential care workers by 1,500 full-time equivalents.

The B.C. Care Providers Association — the lobby group representing private-care home operators — has proposed a number of measures to “refill the pipeline” with new staff, including career promotion, more accessible and affordable education, and the removal of other barriers for entrance into the sector.

But there’s a fundamental problem they have failed to address. And that’s retaining care staff in a system rife with contracting out and wide difference in wages and working conditions from one care home to another.

To stretch the metaphor, there’s a serious leak in the pipeline — one that the private care home lobby has chosen to ignore in their proposals.

Despite their public funding, care home operators can contract out services and flip those contracts at will. In the process, entire staff teams are fired to make way for new subcontractors that may, or may not, rehire them and often at a lower wage.

It’s a practice that destabilizes both the continuity and quality of care seniors receive while driving down workers’ wages to boost the bottom line.

With workers looking for a future with decent wages and job security, it’s also not the best advertising for a career in seniors’ care.

Contracting out of staff and expanded privatization of care homes were marquee policies of the B.C. Liberals. But these failed policies continue to wreak havoc despite a change in government.

In Coquitlam, 150 staff are about to lose their jobs at the publicly funded Lakeshore and Madison care centres, leaving nearly 200 seniors without their familiar and trusted caregivers.

The facilities’ owner is switching or “flipping” subcontractors, resulting in the layoff of care aides, LPNs, activity workers, housekeepers and food service workers.

After staff work their last day, the residents of Lakeshore and Madison will need to adjust to new faces.

For those with dementia, it will be a long, difficult adjustment, which will likely provoke challenging behaviour.

Residents who have no family but have come to depend on their trusted caregivers to remember their birthdays or be their friend — will be utterly lost.

For the family members of people in care, who know how important familiar caregivers are to their loved one, it will be stressful. They will find themselves, once again, trying to help settle their loved ones into a changed environment.

And experienced, dedicated care staff will be left wondering about their futures — and whether a career in seniors’ care is the right choice.

If we, as British Columbians, want to ensure seniors have stable, quality care, we must call for an end to the practice of mass layoffs.

In the last election, the NDP campaigned to “support relationship-based care, and ensure those care relationships are not disrupted by contracting out or contract-flipping.”

The sooner our provincial government repeals the laws and policies that destabilize seniors’ care and undermine decent work the better.