Province set to strengthen its oversight of care aides
The provincial government is moving to close loopholes in the B.C. Care Aide and Community Health Worker Registry that could let a care aide who has abused a senior continue to work in the field.
The province is considering a new registry for B.C.’s 33,000 care aides under the jurisdiction of a new single nursing college that has been proposed to replace the three colleges that regulate nurses.
“It’s a good step,” said Isobel Mackenzie, the B.C. seniors advocate. Mackenzie once worked at the B.C. Care Aide and Community Health Worker Registry, which began in 2010.
“I’m not alone with my concerns about the registry. I saw its benefits and its shortcomings,” she said.
The existing registry provides oversight for care aides who work in publicly funded facilities, but someone working in a private facility can opt out of registration, she said. The registry only monitors physical, verbal or financial abuse, and does not review the competence of workers.
As of March, the registry has received 435 reports from employers alleging abuse. Of these, 217 care aides were fired by their employers and 218 received temporary suspensions.
“We need to look at how we can support competency. The profession of a care aide will be enhanced by this and for well-meaning, competent care aides, they won’t notice any difference,” Mackenzie said.
Daniel Fontaine, the CEO of the B.C. Care Providers Association, said the current system is flawed.
“It’s not putting the needs of seniors first,” he said. “We’ve advocated for the B.C. government to have them managed through a nursing registry. There are care aides that fall outside the system, and therefore (the registry) is not doing what it was intended for, and that is protecting seniors.”
Fontaine said if a worker is suspected of abusing a senior or a vulnerable adult in their care, they can simply quit their job and the disciplinary investigation ends.
“There are numerous examples where they’ll apply for a new job and the next employer is not aware of what happened at the previous work site,” he said. “It has huge loopholes that don’t serve seniors.”
Under the current system, if a health-care worker is investigated, the cost is shared by the union and the employer, and investigations of non-union aides are funded by the registry.
In a press release Monday, the Health Ministry said “concerns about the limited ability of the current registry model to provide oversight of health-care assistants have been expressed by the B.C. ombudsperson, the B.C. seniors advocate and through an external review initiated by the Ministry of Health.”
The ministry said that in June, the College of Licensed Practical Nurses, the College of Registered Nurses and the College of Registered Psychiatric Nurses announced they are working to form a single nursing college. With health-care assistants providing basic nursing care and the infrastructure already in place to monitor the registry, a majority of those involved indicated support for moving the care aid registry under the new nursing college.
The process of setting up the new model to oversee health-care aides is expected to take at least two years.