PSWs

Hourly wages for Personal Support Workers (PSWs) in Canada:

	Public	Private NFP	Private FP	Overall
Unionized	$14.65	$11.74	$13.97	$13.49
Non-Unionized	$13.42	$11.52	$11.79	$11.95
Overall	$14.41	$11.66	$12.04	$12.71

We tuned into the talk channel while driving up the road the other day and happened upon a CBC programme that shocked us. They were interviewing women who worked as care-givers in Ontario's residences for the elderly. Untrained as nurses, these PSWs are being expected / required to do nursing jobs: give insulin injections, monitor blood-sugar levels and degrees of dementia, administer narcotics and so on. This is all against the rules, but it sounds as though the real nurses are too overstretched to find time to do these tasks themselves or even––and here's the disturbing part––to train the PSWs to do these things properly. Accordingly, these untrained orderlies* are terrified by the amount of responsibility thrust upon them, are making drastic mistakes, cannot sleep at night, and are desperate to drop out, if only they could find a better job.

Meanwhile the elderly are helplessly vulnerable in the unmonitored system. Obviously proper standards of care ought to be enforced. Why not? Because if health and safety inspection officers were to have private residences closed, it would put so much more of a burden onto the public health care system which Health Canada (and, indirectly of course, taxpayers) can ill afford to pay for. So nothing much is done about it.

I'm sure Canada is not the only country that has this problem.

Should we be saving up like crazy to afford the best quality of residential life that money can buy, or trying to lobby the politicians before it's too late, or just accepting whatever fate is in store for us and our friends and relations, in the hope that our old age won't turn out to be as dire as we fear?

* I used the word "orderlies" because my dad was one of those once, a nursing orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He too had to do some shocking work to help out the higher ranks when situations became critical, for very little pay, under minimal supervision (although he did get fairly thorough training). That was in wartime. The rank and file tended not to question the way things were, in those days. The RAMC motto is In Arduis Fidelis, Faithful In Adversity. They knew where they stood.