Home health care workers on strike across Ontario

[blake 3:17]

Home health care workers on strike across Ontario

Almost 3,000 health care workers went on strike Friday morning at nine Community Care Access Centres across Ontario after rejecting a contract offer Thursday night.

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The strike does not affect the Champlain, Central West, Mississauga Halton and Toronto Central centres, where employees are not represented by the ONA.
During the strike, the centres will be open to patients, families and the general public, according to a statement released Friday. The centres will “continue to work closely with hospital partners to ensure patients are able to transition home from hospital safely.”
Service providers contracted through the centres will continue to provide home care and services such as personal support, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and social work, among others, in keeping with patients’ care plans, said Megan Allen-Lamb, CEO of the North Simcoe Muskoka centre.
New patients referred to centres affected by the strike will be triaged so those with the greatest need and most complex cases will get prioritized, said Allen-Lamb.
“We have staff that are not represented by ONA. We have redeployed them to different positions within the CCAC, ensuring that we are able to take calls from our patients throughout the labour disruptions and handle any patient calls that come in through the CCAC,” she said.

Patients will continue to receive care in homes, schools and clinics without interruption, while those waiting for a room in a long-term care home will be contacted as soon as one becomes available.

Health-care workers picketed across the province, carrying signs reading, “Protect patients not profits,” and “Honk if you love nurses.”

In Toronto, strikers marched outside the CCAC office at 45 Sheppard Ave. E.
“We are ready to return to the bargaining table at any time to negotiate a settlement and are committed to negotiating agreements that are fair, responsible and reflect our commitment to providing high-quality service with the prudent use of public funds,” Allen-Lamb said in the news release.

full article: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/01/30/home-health-care-workers-on-strike-across-ontario.html

[blake 3:17]

Eric Hoskins’ best chance to fix ailing health system: Hepburn
Rot, indifference and inaction are crippling Ontario home-care delivery.


There must be something rotten deep in the bowels of the Ontario Ministry of Health.
That’s a harsh indictment of a ministry filled with many hard-working people and whose main purpose is to ensure everyone living in Ontario receives quality health care in a timely manner.
But how else can you explain a bureaucracy that touts home and community care as one of the key elements of our cash-strapped health system, then either silently encourages or turns a blind eye as local agencies slash vital services for thousands of sick and elderly patients?
How else can you explain a bureaucracy that lets senior executives at provincial health agencies get huge pay raises of up to 50 per cent, or $90,000, over three years?
How else can you explain a bureaucracy that lets these same executives get away with forcing some of their key employees to work without a contract for a year and then offer them no pay raise, prompting them to go on strike?
How else can you explain a bureaucracy that lets its new boss, Health Minister Eric Hoskins, deliver a major speech earlier this week about a new “action plan” that was filled with public relations buzzwords about “transparency” and “transformation,” but lacked real details and, at its worst, was a rehash of an “action plan” issued in 2012 by his predecessor Deb Matthews?
Those questions should haunt Hoskins as he tries to move forward on fixing the province’s ailing health-care system.
Indeed, these are difficult days for Hoskins, who is dealing with a strike by about 3,000 home-care nurses and care co-ordinators in nine of the Community Care Access Centres across Ontario who have been without a contract for almost a year and have had hardly any pay increase in the last three years.
Hoskins is also facing a showdown with the province’s 28,000 doctors. Negotiations with doctors broke down last month and starting this week the government is unilaterally cutting their fees by 2.65 per cent.
His biggest challenge, though, will be to fight through the bureaucratic malaise within his own ministry, go beyond their nattering about “transformation” and bring about real change in home and community care.
The reason for this is simple: it’s far cheaper and more patient-friendly to deliver care, ranging from nursing to rehabilitation therapy to personal support, at home than in a hospital.
The problem is that Queen’s Park bureaucrats have been forcing hospitals to push patients out their doors as fast as possible, but have failed miserably in providing enough money to offer patients more than just a few token visits — in some cases as few as one or two — by a health-care worker once they are back home.
Even Hoskins admits the system is a mess.
“The current experience of our loved ones in this section, as we know from the feedback we have received from thousands of individuals and families, is uneven and disjointed. And I know our caregivers feel that every single day,” he said in his speech on Monday.
If that isn’t a clear condemnation of the job done before him by his Queen’s Park bureaucrats and Matthews, then I don’t know what is.
The current strike by CCAC workers, who help co-ordinate home care and transition patients from hospitals to rehab or long-term care facilities, is a prime example of a system gone wrong.
Community-care nurses are the only sector of nurses being asked to have their wages frozen. The strike, which started Jan. 30, will soon begin to affect patients set to be discharged from hospitals and who need continued care at home.
How can Hoskins claim the home-care sector is critical, but won’t do anything to get high-paid CCAC executives to resume serious bargaining with the nurses?
At the same time, these CCAC bosses have told private companies whose health-care workers actually deliver services to patients at home that they won’t get an increase in the rates they can charge. Also, some firms have seen their work reduced anywhere from 10 to 50 per cent because of penny-pinching by CCACs.
The result is that most home- and community-care health workers haven’t seen a pay raise in years.
The message is clear: community-care work doesn’t pay. As one worker from outside Toronto told me this week in an email, the “people who take care of you at home are not there for the money. They are committed to you and they love their job, but enough is enough.”
On Thursday, Hoskins announced Ontario will allocate $75 million this year to support more home care for patients who need help in such things as dressing and bathing. It’s not much, but anything helps.
For his part, Hoskins admits home and community care is ripe for change, stressing he is “committed to seeing it through.”
But to that he will have to deal first with the rot, indifference and inaction within his own ministry.
That may be his best — and maybe his only — chance to fix Ontario’s ailing health-care system.
Bob Hepburn’s column appears Thursday. [email protected]