cALEB NICKERSON

PONTIAC July 17, 2019

Local health care workers are speaking out about their work conditions, and are calling on officials to step up their staffing efforts.

Several personal support workers (PAB) employed at the long-term care facilities in the region spoke to The Equity under the condition that their names wouldn’t be published, due to fear of repercussions from their employer, CISSSO. For the same reason, many PABs contacted by The Equity either didn’t respond or declined to speak.

Those that did, spoke of chronic short-staffing, which is increasingly causing burnout among those pulling double duty.

In an email, one referred to it as a domino effect, which would only get worse with time.

“Burnout is certainly affecting more staff members than it was even a year ago,” another said in a phone interview. “If they’re not running with a full staff, then the staff that do show up have to do extra.”

A lack of staff, especially on weekends in the summer, means that some non-critical patient care gets abbreviated or delayed, which again, snowballs with time. It also means that more staff are required to travel between the three long-term care facilities in the region, often at the last minute.

The Pontiac representatives from the Syndicat des travailleuses et des travailleurs de la santé et des services sociaux de l’Outaouais – CSN (STTSSSO-CSN), which represents PABs, housekeepers, administrative staff and other trades within the health service, said that staffing is an issue throughout the region (and the province for that matter) in all occupations. However, they agreed that short staffing is the toughest on their front-line staff who deal directly with patients.

“It’s everywhere they’re missing people,” said Michelle Bourgoin, General Vice-president for the Pontiac Region.

She added that her goal in speaking out was not to nitpick, but to offer constructive criticism.

“People have a right to complain, but the point is we need more people to work so for me to put something in the newspaper, it’s to help my members,” she said.

There have been some efforts to deal with the amount of overtime required of PABs and nurses. Recently, CISSSO announced that they would be offering a $75 bonus per shift for working three consecutive weekends. However, Bourgoin said that there were a number of stipulations that would mean that the bonus wouldn’t have much of an impact.

“It will be hard for people to get it I think,” she said.

One PAB said the bonus would mean “zilch” in the grand scheme of things. They also pointed out that it does nothing to address the core issue, which is attracting more staff in the first place.

Bourgoin said that in the past year or so, several occupations had their hiring requirements lowered, to cast a wider net for applicants. Her colleague Christa Fleury gave several examples, such as secretaries requiring only a secondaire 5 (high school) diploma, rather than a post-secondary secretarial course and housekeeping staff only needing their secondaire 3, when before it was secondaire 5.

They also spoke about the challenges to hiring, with number one being the proximity to Ontario, where the health care jobs tend to pay more.

“It’s more money [over there], people are young and they just look at dollars per hour,” Bourgoin said.

In addition, CISSSO’s hiring is done largely online and has been centralized in Gatineau, which can mean a longer gap between application and hiring. Fleury said that potential applicants often find jobs elsewhere in the meantime.

“If people send resumes for jobs they don’t really apply here, they apply on the internet and after that recruitment in the city… can take a month,” Bourgoin said. “It used to be done here, and now they have to wait.”

CISSSO spokesperson Marie-Pier Després said that CISSSO hosts job fairs throughout the region, and works with local English and French schools to recruit students.

She also pointed to statistics from the Institute de la statistique Quebec, which indicate that the Outaouais as a whole has a slighty lower ratio of nurses to residents (10.28 per 100,000) than the rest of the province (13.63 per 100,000). That ratio has stayed consistent over the years the institute has tracked the data, from 2012 to 2017. The overall number of nurses has actually increased during that time period (4.1 per cent for the Outaouais, 2.8 per cent for Quebec), but it hasn’t kept pace with population growth.

This coincides with the findings of the Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques (IRIS), which released a report in 2018 that said the Outaouais health care system is underfunded compared to the rest of the province. According to IRIS’s report, Quebec spends approximately 75 cents in the Outaouais for every dollar spent in similar sized regions, or $1,938 per resident per year, compared to an average of $2,569 per resident per year across the province.

The report also states that Quebec spends tens of millions in reimbursements for Outaouais residents who travel out of province for care, often to facilities like CHEO in Ottawa. Speaking to CBC in August of last year, IRIS researcher Bertrand Schepper said that the money spent on out-of-province care would easily cover the cost of attracting and hiring more workers.

Despite the challenges, Bourgoin was hopeful that a solution would be found.

“Maybe you could put a line at the bottom [of the article], we’re still hiring,” she said.