A recent Ottawa Citizen article has brought attention to the recruitment and retention challenges facing Ontario’s home support sector. The story illustrates that while Personal Support Workers (often referred to as health care assistants, or home support workers in B.C.) are urgently needed given an aging population, they are also facing a series of challenges resulting in what many are calling a crisis in Ontario.
The struggle to find and keep Personal Support Workers (PSWs) is not confined to Ontario. Many of these challenges will sound familiar to home health care organizations in B.C., who report that qualified workers are hard to recruit, harder to retain, and that the number of workforce entrants is simply not keeping up with the demand.
Daniel Fontaine, CEO, BCCPA and Chair of the Canadian Association for Long Term Care (CALTC) said the article underscored a national trend in home support.
“While this specific article focuses on issues facing home support workers in Ontario, the problems identified here are hardly unique to one province. All Canadians interested in the future of continuing care should be concerned with them, and one of the big takeaways should be the need for a comprehensive health human resource strategy for the broader sector, both here in B.C. but also across Canada,” says Fontaine.
BCCPA’s June report, Situation Critical: A Made-in-BC Plan to Address the Seniors Care Labour Shortage, highlighted practical strategies and approaches to addressing the challenges facing the sector, and recently CALTC announced this as a priority area in the Association’s strategic plan.
“These are not only local but national issues,” says Fontaine.
The Citizen highlighted several promising approaches in this article. For example, in Ontario the Loyalist College now graduates two classes of prospective PSWs per year and has widened the area of its tutelage to include several rural locations. In B.C., the Vancouver School Board voted in the spring to double the number of dual-credit health care assistant program seats from two to four, beginning in 2019, to encourage more high school students to pursue a career in the sector.
While new investment into the sector has occurred in both B.C. and Ontario, it has hasn’t accounted for changing demographics.
“The senior care sector is emerging as the fastest-growing job market in the nation. Getting people into the field, and keeping them there, is the challenge we now face,” says Fontaine.
