Red Deer Advocate

Short-staffed? Who knew?



By Greg Neiman - Red Deer Advocate
Published: September 29, 2010 8:35 AM
It shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a staffing shortage at Extendicare Michener Hill, the recently-opened seniors care facility to replace Red Deer Nursing Home and Valley Park Manor. The province has been a net exporter of health workers ever since Alberta Health Services took over the operation of the system in province.
As of a week ago, there were just over 100 workers at Michener Hill, which is expected to have up to 250 at full capacity. According to AUPE, a quarter of the staff at Michener Hill had come from our two aging nursing homes, at the time of their recent vote, which chose AUPE to be their union.
More staff have been hired since that vote and Michener Hill now reports to be at 60 per cent of a full complement of staff.
But 60 per cent is not near enough for Michener Hill to continue to accept transfers from the nursing homes — especially when families learn that much of the shifts being worked are by employees brought in from other Extendicare facilities in the province, and many of them are working double shifts and overtime.
The service is not, as the saying goes, as advertised.
Obviously, this situation cannot be sustained.
The lack of preparation on Extendicare’s part should not be excused. They knew exactly how many patients to expect — they had drawn up a program of transfers well in advance of opening day. They knew that they would quickly be at full capacity, they knew what their staff requirements would be. But those staff are not there.
Why? Were Extendicare managers surprised at the low numbers of staff who agreed to transfer to Michener Hill?
Ask yourself: if you had a family and bills to pay, would you leave your seniority and job security with the public health system to go to a for-profit facility with no seniority — and not even a collective agreement on wages and working conditions in place? Or would you use your seniority and move to a similar job within the public system, bumping casual staff (who could then, in theory, apply with Michener Hill)?
Paulette Bearer described the situation as she cancelled her 97-year-old mother’s move from Valley Park Manor: “I did not expect to find this mess. I live in the States. I know what bad health care is like.”
In the past few days, Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky announced an aggressive recruitment plan for doctors, nurses, practical nurses — all of it. One hopes to high heaven the recruitment plan comes with a plan to actually hire the recruits, but between government and AHS, you can never be sure.
How many health care workers has Alberta paid to train over the past five or six years — who then left for Saskatchewan, the Maritimes or the U.S., because there were no jobs for them here? How many millions of dollars of investment in training them was lost because of the AHS hiring freeze — during a well-demonstrated staff shortage? How many millions is it going to cost to try to lure them back? And why would we spend tax dollars to recruit health workers for seniors, when the only positions available to them are at for-profit corporations? Shouldn’t that be their job?
Albertans were warned something like this would happen. Union reps, staff and advocacy groups like the Central Alberta Council on Aging have said all along that understaffing was the first resort of for-profit health care.
Bearer has first-hand experience of that. “Since I live in the States, I have to deal with that all the time. They understaff, underpay, under-supply. How else are they going to make money?”
Now she’s seeing this on both sides of the border.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.