Manitoba’s home and long-term care straining to see end of staffing struggles – Winnipeg

Home and long-term care in Manitoba is losing out on long-term staff, a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives finds.

While staffing challenges are hardly new to the sector, systematic issues are causing workers to walk away.

According to new research, based on a summer Probe Research survey with more than 1,000 participants, burnout, overtime and private agency staff run rampant in the home and long-term care sectors.

“We are not surprised at the issue of understaffing,” said Niall Harney, senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said. “What we see here is that we had a system that was already vulnerable, and we saw during COVID that those vulnerabilities were really laid bare throughout the pandemic.”

Almost 75 per cent of workers said staffing levels are worse now than before the pandemic, and over 50 per cent say they’ll likely quit within the next five years.

“What we need is not just piecemeal efforts to increase staffing in the sectors. We need to see a transformational investment,” Harney said.

He recommends increasing benefits and wages to improve patient care and working conditions for a workforce mostly made of newcomers and women, and that Manitoba follow Saskatchewan’s lead in moving personal care homes into the public sector.

“It’s certainly within the realm of possibility for funding to make that a reality, and potentially centralization,” he said, adding that a provincial funding boost of 181 million dollars annually, is achievable given the province’s bump in federal health transfers.

Filling gaps with private agency staff isn’t financially sustainable, said Harney.

However, Sue Vovchuk, Executive Director of the Long Term and Continuing Care Association of Manitoba said the sector doesn’t have a choice because it’s coming up short trying to fill positions with funding they already have.

“Homes have been funded up to 3.8 hours of resident care per day. We know we’re eventually going to get funding to fund 4.1 hours of resident care per day. The homes are already struggling to find staff to meet that, so we know that if we have to get to 4.1, there’s going to have to be a human resource strategy,” she said.

Manitoba’s minister for seniors declined to answer questions in an interview, but said in a statement, the province has earmarked 34-million dollars since releasing its seniors’ strategy in February.

— With files from Global’s Rosanna Hempel

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