By Meena Brisard 

In BC, our long-term care homes and assisted living facilities have struggled to provide the care the elderly deserve in the face of staff shortages, bed shortages, and the devastating impact of COVID-19 on residents and their families.

As a province, we rose to these challenges by making important investments in care to address the impact of the pandemic and to make our care homes more resilient in the future.

The provincial government boosted staffing levels, brought in an innovative Health Career Access Program (which has put thousands of additional care aides on the front line), and provided wage subsidies to low-wage care home operators so that they would not lose staff during the pandemic.

But at a time when we needed to massively invest in seniors’ care, a new report from BC seniors advocate Isobel Mackenzie shows that publicly-contracted care homes are increasing their profits while cutting back on services.

Her report, Billions More Reasons to Care, finds that these care home operators doubled their profits between 2017/2018 and 2021/2022, while at the same time failing to deliver hundreds of thousands of care hours for seniors.

And over this five-year period, for-profit care home operators increased their profits from $3,439 per bed to $7,465 per bed—more than seven times the amount of surplus generated by non-profit care operators. At the same time, for-profit care home operators failed to deliver 500,000 care hours for which they received funding. Five years earlier, that shortfall was 207,000 hours. Non-profit care homes delivered 93,000 more hours of care than they were funded to deliver (up from 80,000 in 2017/2018).

Mackenzie’s report also shows a wide variation in labour costs between for-profit and non-profit providers ,despite the additional funding provided to top up wages during the pandemic to match those in public sector agreements.

Our long-term care system is fragmented, with a wide range of working and caring conditions. And those flaws are having a very real impact on workers who are burning out from increasingly heavy workloads. They are often left to work long hours as their coworkers quit for-profit facilities with better compensation packages and safer caring conditions. 

In 2022, a survey of our members found that one-out-of-three are considering leaving health care, and two-thirds say their workloads have worsened. If action isn’t taken, health care workers will continue to burn out, and seniors will miss out on the care they need.

The report’s findings underscore the need for the BC Government to make fundamental reforms to the long-term care system, including the implementation of its 2020 election promise to restore the common standard for wages, benefits, and working conditions that had been dismantled by the previous government.

Our current government inherited a fragmented long-term care system. But they can stabilize it for better quality care by bringing in greater transparency to ensure public funding goes to frontline care, enforcing regulations so operators meet standards, investing all new care home funding in public and non-profit care homes and ending the practice of sub-contracting care and support services. This would promote a level playing field for workers and residents.

And perhaps most importantly, they can restore the common standards we had in place 20 years ago to reduce staff turnover and provide a standard level of working and caring conditions across all long-term care homes and assisted living facilities.

Together, these actions by the government would put the focus back on seniors receiving the care they need. Our leaders need to follow through on their commitments to fix this issue. They have a plan. They just need to carry it out.

Meena Brisard is the secretary-business manager of the Hospital Employees’ Union: BC’s largest health care union representing more than 60,000 health care workers across the province—including about 28,000 working directly with seniors in long-term care and other care settings.