Our team is remarkable despite top-up mess

Janice Kaffer says hospital workers’ impressive effort making a difference.

Hôtel Dieu Grace Healthcare is a post-acute hospital in West Windsor.

We don’t have emergency rooms or operating rooms or intensive care units. The work we do here is different and it’s meaningful and valuable to our community although frankly a lot of you reading this probably don’t know much about us.

In some ways that’s to be expected since we do rehabilitation, palliative care, mental health and addictions work, plus children’s mental health.

We also do something called complex medical care for members of our community that need a little more time to get home than they usually can accommodate in acute care.

Those of you who know what we do likely know someone who needed us — that’s what we do — we’re here when you need us in a different way from acute care.

We are important and our staff members are, too.

That’s why I’m struggling — and our employees are really struggling — with understanding why our provincial government made the decision to recognize some staff in our hospital with a pandemic pay and bonus payment scheme, but not all.

They recognized forward facing staff like nurses, but not physiotherapists; respiratory therapists, but not speech therapists; security staff, but not pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.

I have talked to dozens of staff members here at HDGH who ask me why some and not others?

I don’t have an answer. I don’t know.

What I do know is that each and every one of our people at HDGH have pulled together for the past three months in service to our community.

I’ve seen many employees step out of their normal roles and put in extraordinary effort to provide support and care to families who can’t come into our hospital right now.

I’ve seen our physiotherapists, occupational therapists and certified rehabilitation assistants working extra hard to continue to provide a high quality of care to patients despite not being able to follow their usual routines due to physical distancing concerns.

I’ve seen our staff, almost unrecognizable, because of their PPE providing personal and sensitive care to patients on our palliative care unit because there is a need.

I’ve seen our managers and directors working countless hours trying to put all the pieces together in order to keep everyone here at HDGH safe.

There are so many stories of our team stepping up, leaning in and doing what’s needed to be done.

They didn’t ask for payment — they do this because they are health-care workers and that’s what they do. They step up when our community needs them.

I am immensely proud of each and every one of them. I have told them all that this money — this recognition that some are getting and some are not — isn’t about their value or their worth to our community or to me personally.

It’s unfortunate and incredibly disappointing to us all that such a good idea about recognition for our front line health care workers turned into such a mess, but it did.

Therefore, it is what it is. We all move on from here. I’ve also told them all that to me, to our board of directors and to our community they are worth much more than they know. That if it was up to me every single employee would have been recognized.

Since I can’t pay them, I want to say publicly that each one of them matters. Each one of them is making a difference. Each one of them is deserving in my eyes.

We’re a team here. Let’s keep it that way.

We stand strong, changing lives together.

Janice Kaffer is president and CEO of Hôtel-dieu Grace Healthcare.