By Daniel Fontaine, Chair, Canadian Association for Long Term Care
Health professionals are not only caring for seniors at a later age in life, but they are caring for individuals with multiple and complex medical conditions. Without urgent attention, there will not be a health-care professional there to support a senior in need.
As we celebrated Labour Day a couple weeks ago, we paused and reflected on the significant contribution Canadian workers have and continue to make for our country. It was an opportunity to reflect on what our labour force needs to be successful now and into the future.
Today, our health-care system is grappling with a significant demographic shift that is increasingly threatening its sustainability. Seniors today are the fastest-growing demographic, and in the next few years, we know that seniors will outgrow our youngest for the first time in our country’s history. This staggering reality leads us to recognize that caring for our seniors is going to strain our health-care budgets and that our labour force is ill-equipped to tackle this growing challenge. Expecting that those working in our health-care system can appropriately care for our seniors based on the existing system and support structure is not feasible.
Consistently, recent modelling and studies have shown that there just are not enough health-care professionals to support the growing number of seniors that will require more care in the coming years. A recent SafeCare BC report flagged that 95 per cent of seniors’ care providers report staff shortages. The Conference Board of Canada has also reported that, to meet the growing need, the nursing workforce would be required to grow by 3.4 per cent annually. That growth rate is a mere one per cent. The same can also be said for health-care assistants (HCAs), also known as personal support workers, or health care aides. The demand for HCA services in the coming years is three per cent higher than the current supply of available workers.
It is also important to recognize that the overall staffing shortage is not the only obstacle the sector is facing. There has, and continues to be, challenges in retention, recruitment, and training. As one example, recent studies have indicated that 90 per cent of Canadian front-line care workers have experienced physical violence in residential settings and just less than half of those have reported it taking place on a daily basis.
No one can deny that there are a multitude of other challenges and competing priorities that the health-care system is facing in 2018. However, this human resources crisis is uniquely important.Health professionals are not only caring for seniors at a later age in life, but they are caring for individuals with multiple and complex medical conditions. Without urgent attention, there will not be a health-care professional there to support a senior in need. As the critical debate about universal access to prescription drug coverage continues to gain traction in Canada, the question remains: what is the point of universal drug coverage if there isn’t even a health-care professional there to help our most vulnerable take their medically necessary drugs?
Our health-care system needs the same injection of ingenuity, investment, and attention that we have given it in the past in order to address the brewing crisis the sector faces across the country. This is why it is incumbent on federal, provincial, and territorial governments and their health and finance ministers to address this issue—as they have before—with leadership from the federal government.
Tens of thousands of HCAs and nurses are invested in delivering the care our loved ones deserve. It’s time for the federal government to truly invest in health professionals by building a human resources strategy in this field that will provide systemic improvements in community care to meet current and growing needs.
Daniel Fontaine is chair of the Canadian Association for Long Term Care.
This op-ed was originally published in The Hill Times.
