ONA Home Care Nurses Deserve Decent Wages and Benefits
14 Dec 07 -- The Ontario Nurses' Association (ONA) is urging its 59 St. Joseph's Home Care nurses in Hamilton and Brant and who will lose their jobs in 2008 to not work for any for-profit home care provider who successfully wins a local Community Care Access Centre contract.St. Joseph's Home Care told its staff that it has been deemed "not eligible" to participate further in a Request for Proposal to provide home care services for the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant CCAC. St. Joseph's has provided home care in the area for more than 80 years – and many of its RNs have 20 to 30 years of service. Nurses will lose their jobs as the two CCAC contracts expire – Hamilton's on March 31, 2008 and Brant's on September 30, 2008.
"This situation is absolutely abhorrent," says ONA President Linda Haslam-Stroud, RN. "Our members know their clients, know their community and have decades of experience providing quality patient care. The competitive bidding process is degrading quality patient care, as we warned three years ago when the government reviewed the RFP process, but here we are again – laying off nurses even as the province's nursing shortage goes from bad to worse, and patients pay the price."
Local Bargaining Unit President Janice Bethune, RN, says the news has deeply distressed ONA nurses. "Our nurses care deeply about our clients, and have worked for years to ensure their needs are being met," she says. "We're now being turned loose, and facing either unemployment or working for a provider that will want to cut our wages and benefits. We deserve respect for the work we do, which saves taxpayers money by providing quality patient care in the client's home."
ONA has recommended that the practice of competitive bidding be stopped. Based on experience in the competitive bidding process, ONA found that competition for home care contracts degraded patient care, and degraded the work life of nurses. ONA believes that at the very least, only non-profit home care providers be allowed to submit RFPs, as for–profit organizations do not necessarily provide quality care outcomes, and they pay nurses on a fee-for-service basis, discouraging sufficient time for client care.
"We are pushing for successor rights," says Haslam-Stroud. "As the government works to keep patients in their homes, quality home care services will be more in demand than ever. But our members will not accept a for-profit employer that's more concerned with money in their pockets than investing in our client's care – there are too many other nursing vacancies for RNs that provide better wages, working conditions and benefits than are offered by for-profit providers."