Medical support staff cutbacks — does anyone care?

More health care dollars slashed — cuts affect us all.

Recently, the British Columbia government announced to staff at hospitals and extended care facilities across the province, that there were going to be job cuts, pay cuts and shorter hours in dietary and housekeeping departments in an effort to cut more from the health budget. In a system that has already cut costs to the bone and deeper, another cut is hard to imagine. So ShuNews has done some digging and what we have discovered has raised a great many questions that don’t seem to be receiving any reasonably believable answers.

It would seem that the BC Liberal government has a huge problem on its hands and has left the individual Health Authorities to fix the mess. There is, across the province, a cut-back-and-reduce policy being put into place and every hospital and facility is being affected. Each of the 5 Health Authorities is implementing these directives in its own way, with some even shutting down facilities. In our Interior Health Authority, some jobs have been eliminated and in some areas wages are being cut and hours reduced.

Workers in the BC health care system are employed in particular lines under a benchmark or job description, which is geared to a particular pay grid. Some staff have worked under these job descriptions for many years. It seems that what Interior Health is choosing to do in some areas is to displace all dietary staff, eliminate the present benchmarks and then re-post the positions under a lower benchmark. Staff could lose anywhere from $2 to perhaps $5 or more per hour. At the same time, the total number of hours worked are being reduced.

The situation appears even grimmer when we take into consideration that when staff are displaced, the procedure that is followed is that the positions are reposted and open to all Interior Health employees. This means that someone from outside the local community, for instance, can apply and if that person has seniority, he or she will get the position and the displaced person will be out of a job unless they decide to locate elsewhere.

Those who live some distance away from their work are now wondering if it will be worth the long drive for lower pay. They might get more money working for a fast-food restaurant in their home community. They are feeling that it doesn’t matter how well they have done their job, they are being rewarded by a boss who says in effect, “Thank-you for all the hard work and all the years you have devoted to this company…. Now we are going to cut your wages and your hours of work.”

A very real concern is the poor morale that is engendered in a situation like we are seeing here. And low morale among workers is bound to affect the quality of their work and, in turn, the quality of life for the residents and patients. 

Picture this scenario:

An hour and a half has been cut from a worker’s shift and they still have the same amount of work to do. What is going to happen to the quality of work? Even a person with the best of intentions, will have to work faster and the result could easily be carelessness in the preparation and serving of food or the cleanliness of the surroundings, or even accidents.

An example might be that if you have some pre-packaged, frozen food from Kelowna with the instructions to cook it for 1 ½ hours and you are running out of time, you might only cook it for an hour. If that food just happens to be meat, and you don’t cook it properly, the result could be food poisoning for the residents.

In a situation like we are describing here, tempers can, and will, flare up when the person on one shift hasn’t had enough time to properly clean up or do some portion of their job and it gets left for the next person. And why, after all, should that person care? Nobody cares about them!

What else will be left undone at the end of the day? The workload isn’t changing. You still have a certain number of meals to prepare and certain number of dishes to wash. But now you have fewer ‘man hours’ in which to do the work. Who will have time to do the jobs that have to be done on a weekly basis? What about cleaning the ovens? Wiping down the refrigerators? Organizing the pantry?

The question can then be asked, “If there isn’t enough time, and you’re working with less staff and those staff members are now making less money, how do you determine priorities? What kind of end result do you want to see? Must it be cleanliness vs. efficiency? What about attention to detail, teamwork, co-operation, a happy and productive staff in a peaceful environment? 

The decision-makers in Victoria or Kelowna have it all figured out, right down to the minute and the penny. It is so easy to take your pencil and ruthlessly slash here and slash there, then sit back and say, “Well, we fixed that situation.” But they have absolutely no interest or even concern, about how their grand plans are going to work in real time and with real people. It would seem that they don’t much care, so where does that leave the patients in hospitals and residential care facilities across British Columbia? Up the proverbial creek, likely. Who cares about them?

Isn’t there anyone – even one person — in our esteemed government who gets the picture? Our lack of care for the people who made this province what it is today is but a reflection of the sad condition of our society. We enjoy the benefits of living in this beautiful province and forget that these forgotten people in our care facilities worked hard, suffered greatly and did it gladly because they knew they were forging a wonderful future for those that would inherit this land and its amazing resources. And those very people whom they have trusted to remember them have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to their voices.

When are British Columbians going to get angry enough to stand up and say, “no more!”?