Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) is moving to fast-track training to shore up its home-care workforce by the summer but the model isn’t without concerns.
The paid month-long training model – which other provinces are already exploring – aims to get at least 200 uncertified home-care attendants helping in Winnipeg homes.
“In Winnipeg, in Manitoba, where we have a huge home-care crisis, where we just have a significant lack of workers, having people who can at least do something rather than nothing, I think is a step forward,” said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health and the University Health Network in Toronto.
“Quebec, for example, Ontario, that are also dealing with significant health, human resources crises, are looking at finding other ways to quickly fast track people into caring roles in our society.”
On Monday, the WRHA said it needed up to about 340 people to close its 21 per cent home care vacancy rate.
Sinha said expediting and facilitating training could attract people who may want to upgrade their skills later but it’ll be key for recruits to be assigned clients they can handle to ensure everyone’s safety.
Safety is an area of concern for the union representing home-care workers as it isn’t entirely confident upgrading of skills later is going to happen.
“I just find it’s very fast. These are people that aren’t going to be working side by side after the four weeks with somebody. They’ll be on their own,” said Debbie Boissonneault, CUPE 204 president.
“Doing two weeks in class and two weeks following a certified health-care aide, they’re not going to see all the experiences that they probably should know.”
Boissonneault said the move also makes certified home-care attendants feel undervalued, those who funded their education themselves and got paid a starting wage of a dollar more an hour than the $19 an hour the WRHA is offering recruits.
“We need to employ and recruit, but we have to retain, and I think the biggest thing that we’re forgetting here is retaining the people that we have in the system.”
However, bolstering home care is progress as the province’s aging population grows and more people opt for home care. According to the Alzheimer Society of Manitoba, the number of people living with dementia in the province will double to 39,000 in the next 20 years.
“Is there going to be capacity in the system to support them? I think that’s a fundamental question that we need to ask, and I’m not sure right now that we’re set up for the increase,” said Erin Crawford, program director at the Alzheimer Society of Manitoba.
“It’s really important and necessary that there be initiatives to get more people into the field of home care.”
Crawford said good dementia education is always important, “yet I also know it needs to be balanced with the need to get people into positions ASAP so that those supports are also in place. So I think I think both are really important.”
Sinha said Manitoba’s investments in home care over the past decade are among the lowest in Canada.
“So what do I see as the future? The future’s absolutely having more care to allow people to stay in their own homes for as long as possible.”
– with files from Global’s Rosanna Hempel
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