Via The Tyee, my colleague Andrew MacLeod writes: Home Care Is Supposed to Help. In a Pandemic It May Hurt. Excerpt:
The patchy state of B.C.’s home-care sector is creating a huge potential for the spread of COVD-19 among vulnerable seniors.
That’s the assessment of Matthew Lowe, who has 14 years’ experience in the sector and is the founder of Community Plus Home Health Care & Nursing in Greater Victoria.
“To have all these people running around out there, with no supplies, possibly no training, providing services to our seniors in the middle of a pandemic when we don’t know where this is spreading right now, it’s insane,” Lowe said.
Lowe is not alone. A June report by B.C.’s Office of the Seniors Advocate raised concerns about the performance of the sector long before the pandemic hit.
Some 40,000 people receive home support each year. It’s delivered through the province’s health authorities by nearly 10,000 community health workers, according to that report.
The workers help people, many of them seniors or vulnerable, with daily tasks that require close personal contact — like getting out of bed, taking medicine, bathing, dressing, eating, grooming and using the toilet. Workers visit several homes a day.
Public services are delivered by a mix of health authority staff and contract agencies. Companies that provide similar services to people who pay privately are also used by the health authorities when demand rises.
Lowe said his company pays a living wage and has nurses and caregivers on staff.
But he said some companies doing overflow work for Island Health manage their workers as subcontractors and download responsibility for following requirements like having protective equipment, such as gloves, to them.
“Some of them would take gloves from other providers, some of them would actually buy their own, but a lot of them would just go out there with nothing,” Lowe said.
Some companies in the sector have a long history of cutting corners and hiring with little screening as they’ve been desperate to fill positions, he said. “A lot of them, as uncertified unregistered caregivers, may have never had a hand hygiene education in their life and that should be really scary to a lot of people, especially when you have these people basically hopping across homes across Victoria,” he said.
“What greater opportunity is there to spread an illness like this to our most vulnerable seniors besides a home-support worker? There aren’t a lot of other individuals out there who are going in, providing a highly personal service at close proximity, and doing it across a large region.”
