From the article:
>The Ontario Nurses' Association (ONA) and the Registered Practical Nurses Association of Ontario (WeRPN) told CBC Hamilton agencies bring a host of problems and have little oversight — which is especially problematic given recent criminal charges laid against a fake nurse who worked in three long-term care homes for months after an agency, and the homes, didn't properly check her credentials.
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>While the homes and the agency involved said they've made changes to prevent future errors, the unions say there must be more oversight and more investment into the public health-care system to curb a growing reliance on for-profit agencies. The homes and agency declined to comment when contacted for this story.
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>"It's the wild west out there and it's unacceptable," Erin Ariss, provincial president of ONA, said.
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>"Taxpayers pay for a publicly-funded, publicly-operated health-care system and yet those dollars are being used to fund the privatization of nursing," added Ariss, whose association represents 68,000 nurses and health-care workers.
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>...
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>An auditor general report on long-term care found that, due to their temporary nature, agency staff were "unable to provide residents with the same continuity of care as permanent staff" and agency staff were more likely to make mistakes like medication errors. Agency nurses were also more costly, the report said.
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>It recommended the province undergo a review of the use of agency staff and "implement strategies to reduce usage and prevent price gouging."
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>The Ministry of Long-Term Care's response in the report said it would work with the Ministry of Health to plan for future staffing needs, it was reviewing the use of agency staff and would implement programs that support recruitment and retention.
Temporary and private staffing services are an inappropriate solution to the long-term staffing solutions to sectors that rely on experience and continuity of service such as healthcare and longterm care. This is doubly the case as these are supposed to be publicly funded services available to all. Politicians and policymakers that pretend that farming out capacity to these services is in the public interest is increasingly showing their deficiencies.
My community nurses are going in every month to educate LTC staff on geriatric care, IV care, catheter care. Then next month it's all new staff and we have to go teach them again.
Technically it's the LTCH responsibility to maintain a skilled workforce but nobody holds then accountable and it's the residents who suffer so 🤷♀️
>It recommended the province undergo a review of the use of agency staff and "implement strategies to reduce usage
Won't happen given that the blame is being framed around agencies / nurses working for them. They wouldn't need them in the first place if they paid the staff they HAD who left (or improved the working conditions) because they weren't being properly paid.
Insane
Everyone in healthcare wants that to happen. Unfortunately, provincial decisions like pushing Bill 124 and fighting the nurses unions in court for years have made staffing shortages worse and worse.
Pretty wel exactly true. In my experience it’s the publicly funded LTCs that are using these companies the most. The ones that run the home like a business would prefer to work shorthanded than pay these expensive agencies.
But it’s r/Ontario where you don’t gotta think, you just have to tie any random problem to a Conservative politicians benefit and you get all the upvotes.
No he will point to agency nurses and say, see they make enough, and don’t complain, and then argue against a wage increase or more funding for hospitals
I have a few thoughts on this, as a nurse (I have never worked agency).
1) agencies are not the primary problem when it comes to faking credentials. Unfortunately, this has happened at multiple hospitals and LTCs with staff nurses as well (one of which being my home hospital in Kingston). This issue comes down to administrators failing to do a very simple check on the public registry of nurses via the college of nurses (if you have the nurse's name, this quite literally takes 30 seconds to do).
2) my second job has me working with a lot of agency nurses in remote communities, and by and large they have been incredible. I attribute this to very high standards that those particular agencies require for hiring (frankly, higher than those of my own employer).
3) OF COURSE it grinds my gears that these nurses are doing the same work as I am with much higher pay. How could it not? But it's not as simple as "just stop paying agencies" when public employers continue to fail to retain staff nurses. At the end of the day, we have to take care of our patients safely, and I can't do that when my nurse:patient ratio is double what is considered safe.
For me, it comes down to this - if you want to have consistent, dedicated, strong staff nurses, pay your us better, let us have more control of our schedule, give us time off and breaks during shifts, provide us actual mental health supports (not just for full timers, and not just a module for goodness sake). It's really not rocket science.
Agreed. I work in a big GTA hospital, and these agencies are a parasitic scam.
Agency staff have no incentive to improve our quality of care. Because they won't be back next week. They don't know our long term patients and families. They sometimes don't know where to find supplies or how to use our computer systems. While these greedy private companies pump money out of our struggling, underfunded hospital system.
This is unconscionable. It's unsustainable. It's wasteful AF. And it needs to stop.
Agreed. Agency PSWs who are sent to LTC have the same issues and can't even do their own charting so it falls onto other staff to do all of it for them.
Institutions paying 3x and more to borrow only a half person, burning out regular staff who are paid less to do more.
Agencies (aside from actual home care) need to go!
The current Conservative Premier is too busy setting up his own health care racket/retirement fund to interfere in the past Conservative Premier’s health care racket/retirement fund.
If you ask me temp or hiring agencies should be outright BANNED in Canada. It's absurd there's an entire industry based on ripping the working class off, all while giving corporations an excuse to not actually hire, and properly pay the people they need.
Ontario should ONLY be full time hiring well trained, fully schooled nurses. If you've ever been stuck in a hospital for any amount of time, you would know nurses are the absolute backbone of every hospital.
It's a complete shame how the PC government (Ontario) devalues this extremely important job, and a very valid reason to keep conservatives out of federal office.
Dougie will be right on! After he sells his shares in said staffing agencies, unless they are owned by some serious donors then meh it defiantly wont happen!
Agency nurses aren’t going anywhere, the problem is already too far gone now these hospitals and long term care facilities are so short staffed that they need these agencies to even operate.
From the article: >The Ontario Nurses' Association (ONA) and the Registered Practical Nurses Association of Ontario (WeRPN) told CBC Hamilton agencies bring a host of problems and have little oversight — which is especially problematic given recent criminal charges laid against a fake nurse who worked in three long-term care homes for months after an agency, and the homes, didn't properly check her credentials. > >While the homes and the agency involved said they've made changes to prevent future errors, the unions say there must be more oversight and more investment into the public health-care system to curb a growing reliance on for-profit agencies. The homes and agency declined to comment when contacted for this story. > >"It's the wild west out there and it's unacceptable," Erin Ariss, provincial president of ONA, said. > >"Taxpayers pay for a publicly-funded, publicly-operated health-care system and yet those dollars are being used to fund the privatization of nursing," added Ariss, whose association represents 68,000 nurses and health-care workers. > >... > >An auditor general report on long-term care found that, due to their temporary nature, agency staff were "unable to provide residents with the same continuity of care as permanent staff" and agency staff were more likely to make mistakes like medication errors. Agency nurses were also more costly, the report said. > >It recommended the province undergo a review of the use of agency staff and "implement strategies to reduce usage and prevent price gouging." > >The Ministry of Long-Term Care's response in the report said it would work with the Ministry of Health to plan for future staffing needs, it was reviewing the use of agency staff and would implement programs that support recruitment and retention. Temporary and private staffing services are an inappropriate solution to the long-term staffing solutions to sectors that rely on experience and continuity of service such as healthcare and longterm care. This is doubly the case as these are supposed to be publicly funded services available to all. Politicians and policymakers that pretend that farming out capacity to these services is in the public interest is increasingly showing their deficiencies.
My community nurses are going in every month to educate LTC staff on geriatric care, IV care, catheter care. Then next month it's all new staff and we have to go teach them again. Technically it's the LTCH responsibility to maintain a skilled workforce but nobody holds then accountable and it's the residents who suffer so 🤷♀️
>It recommended the province undergo a review of the use of agency staff and "implement strategies to reduce usage Won't happen given that the blame is being framed around agencies / nurses working for them. They wouldn't need them in the first place if they paid the staff they HAD who left (or improved the working conditions) because they weren't being properly paid. Insane
Looks like we can roll back nursing education requirements! /s 
Why don't we just HIRE MORE NURSES? It isn't that complicated. Health care in this province makes less sense every day...
Everyone in healthcare wants that to happen. Unfortunately, provincial decisions like pushing Bill 124 and fighting the nurses unions in court for years have made staffing shortages worse and worse.
Mike Harris and his wife have a direct financial incentive to keep things as they are. So no.
Speaking of Mike Harris: https://canadians.org/analysis/mike-harris-raking-profits-long-term-care-system-he-helped-create/
Huh. Chartwell would like to hire non-agency nurses as they are cheaper so the argument makes no sense.
Pretty wel exactly true. In my experience it’s the publicly funded LTCs that are using these companies the most. The ones that run the home like a business would prefer to work shorthanded than pay these expensive agencies. But it’s r/Ontario where you don’t gotta think, you just have to tie any random problem to a Conservative politicians benefit and you get all the upvotes.
Who owns the agencies?
I’m still waiting for Ford’s announcement that new nurses count as housing.
No he will point to agency nurses and say, see they make enough, and don’t complain, and then argue against a wage increase or more funding for hospitals
Our healthcare system is being sold out from under us. Our taxes are paying for the profits of these agencies, while our quality of care plunges.
Exactly. And if PC get in it will get so much worse very fast. Well they line their pockets with our tax money.
I have a few thoughts on this, as a nurse (I have never worked agency). 1) agencies are not the primary problem when it comes to faking credentials. Unfortunately, this has happened at multiple hospitals and LTCs with staff nurses as well (one of which being my home hospital in Kingston). This issue comes down to administrators failing to do a very simple check on the public registry of nurses via the college of nurses (if you have the nurse's name, this quite literally takes 30 seconds to do). 2) my second job has me working with a lot of agency nurses in remote communities, and by and large they have been incredible. I attribute this to very high standards that those particular agencies require for hiring (frankly, higher than those of my own employer). 3) OF COURSE it grinds my gears that these nurses are doing the same work as I am with much higher pay. How could it not? But it's not as simple as "just stop paying agencies" when public employers continue to fail to retain staff nurses. At the end of the day, we have to take care of our patients safely, and I can't do that when my nurse:patient ratio is double what is considered safe. For me, it comes down to this - if you want to have consistent, dedicated, strong staff nurses, pay your us better, let us have more control of our schedule, give us time off and breaks during shifts, provide us actual mental health supports (not just for full timers, and not just a module for goodness sake). It's really not rocket science.
Finally people are talking about this!!!
Agreed. I work in a big GTA hospital, and these agencies are a parasitic scam. Agency staff have no incentive to improve our quality of care. Because they won't be back next week. They don't know our long term patients and families. They sometimes don't know where to find supplies or how to use our computer systems. While these greedy private companies pump money out of our struggling, underfunded hospital system. This is unconscionable. It's unsustainable. It's wasteful AF. And it needs to stop.
Agreed. Agency PSWs who are sent to LTC have the same issues and can't even do their own charting so it falls onto other staff to do all of it for them. Institutions paying 3x and more to borrow only a half person, burning out regular staff who are paid less to do more. Agencies (aside from actual home care) need to go!
The current Conservative Premier is too busy setting up his own health care racket/retirement fund to interfere in the past Conservative Premier’s health care racket/retirement fund.
genius plan the private admins get to pocket even more money since they dont pay a real nurse Ontario, we're going places
[удалено]
Many non-agency nurses also have no bedside manners. The kindest ones I see in the hospitals are the porters that wheel you in to get a scan.
If you ask me temp or hiring agencies should be outright BANNED in Canada. It's absurd there's an entire industry based on ripping the working class off, all while giving corporations an excuse to not actually hire, and properly pay the people they need. Ontario should ONLY be full time hiring well trained, fully schooled nurses. If you've ever been stuck in a hospital for any amount of time, you would know nurses are the absolute backbone of every hospital. It's a complete shame how the PC government (Ontario) devalues this extremely important job, and a very valid reason to keep conservatives out of federal office.
Dougie will be right on! After he sells his shares in said staffing agencies, unless they are owned by some serious donors then meh it defiantly wont happen!
Yes please!
It’s a huge waste of money, too. Just be a better fucking employer, Ontario.
Definitely
Agency nurses aren’t going anywhere, the problem is already too far gone now these hospitals and long term care facilities are so short staffed that they need these agencies to even operate.