Ontario Minister Flip-Flops In Under An Hour On Long-Term Care Staffing
An Ontario minister contradicted herself Monday, an hour after she said there were no issues with staff numbers in long-term care — and then denied she made the original statement.
“The numbers are indicating that our staff are much more secure in their positions,” Minister of Long-Term Care Merrilee Fullerton said in question period. “Our homes are doing well with staffing. There are no issues with staffing collapse in our homes.”
She then walked back her statement immediately after question period.
“To be clear, I don’t believe I’ve ever said there are no staffing issues,” she said when asked by HuffPost Canada how she knew homes had adequate staff.
Fullerton said the province closely monitors homes that have an outbreak to ensure they have adequate staff and evaluate whether they need support from a hospital or community paramedics.
“But in terms of the staffing crisis, it was pre-existing before COVID and we were working to address the pipeline and the retention,” she said. She pointed to the province’s temporary wage increase, which will give an additional $3 per hour to about 50,000 long-term care workers.
On Oct. 6, an official in Fullerton’s ministry, Melanie Fraser, told Ontario’s long-term care commission that during the summer, “we felt like we were 6,000 PSWs short of what would be required across long-term care and home and community care.”
Fraser, associate deputy minister of health service, said the estimate, developed around the end of the pandemic’s first wave, shows the need for that number of PSWs to be split about halfway between long-term care and community care.
Fullerton said if there were 6,000 PSWs available to be hired, they could have been hired.
“I don’t believe that there were 6,000 PSWs coming forward, and I believe it speaks to the importance of creating a culture and [an] environment in long-term care where people want to come and work,” she said.
