![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/ZZZZZZ-17.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nResidents of Ontario\u2019s long-term-care homes and their families have been dealing with lockdowns and visitor bans for nearly a year now. Since July 2020, I have conducted over 90 Zoom or phone interviews with relatives of long-term-care residents, as well as registered nurses (RNs), personal support workers (PSWs), and long-term-care administrators. Many of the people with whom I spoke compared the situation of long-term-care residents during the pandemic to being in jail. Now with the government\u2019s allocation of $42 million to hire security guards, ostensibly to do COVID-19 screening, the system will be moving even closer to jail-like conditions.<\/p>\n
As taxpayers, we should demand any new funding provided by the province to long-term care be used to increase the ratio of staff to residents and provide the four hours per day per resident of hands-on care that was promised in the Time to Care Act, Bill 13, in October 2020. Shockingly, there is no legislation about minimum staff-to-resident ratios in long-term care, beyond requiring one RN to be present in a home at all times, regardless of the number of residents in the home. This means that each long-term-care operator can decide on the number of PSWs to hire. Likewise, each operator can set the compensation rate for PSWs, and in most homes, this is only slightly higher than minimum wage.<\/p>\n
In 2018, there were 50,000 PSWs in Ontario long-term-care homes sharing the equivalent of 32,700 full-time positions: that means many PSWs need to work multiple part-time jobs to make a full-time income, and they do not receive benefits. Moreover, Ontario PSWs are overwhelmingly women (90 per cent) and almost half of them (41 per cent) are people of colour. Physically and psychologically challenging conditions working with long-term-care residents, of whom 90 per cent have some form of cognitive impairment and 86 per cent need extensive assistance with activities of daily living, make burnout almost unavoidable.<\/p>\n