TORONTO – It is a deep crisis that the home care sector is going through. During the Covid-19 pandemic there has been an unprecedented flight of personnel to other parts of the health system. “We have literally lost over 3,000 nurses, qualified therapists and personal support workers,” said Sue VanderBent, CEO of Home Care Ontario, which represents home care providers in Ontario, “and this is very bad news for Ontario residents who are receiving home care because now the number is so small that many people are left waiting at home for a nurse or therapist or PSW who will not arrive.” 

While before the pandemic the organization was able to meet the vast majority of requests – 95% – currently manages to do so for 60% of those who need this type of assistance.

VanderBent has no doubts: the shortage of home care workers was dictated by the best pay in hospitals and long-term care homes. “About 900,000 Ontario residents receive home care each year,” said the CEO of Home Care Ontario, “730,000 in the publicly funded system. This means that several hundred thousand people in Ontario are receiving reduced home care services or receiving no assistance at all.”

Samir Sinha, director of health policy research at the National Institute on Ageing, said the home care situation “is terrible.” “A nurse working in a critical care hospital earns much more than a nurse working in a long-term care home who in turn earns much more than a nurse working in home care,” Sinha said. Covid-19 has devastated the home care system”.

According to Dr. Sinha, nurses left home care at the beginning of the pandemic when centers to test people for Covid popped up across the province. The escape continued when nurses were needed for mass vaccination clinics and later for contact tracing. “The pay in all these jobs available on the market to deal with the Covid pandemic is higher than that of a nurse working in a home care system,” Sinha said.

In a recent survey commissioned by Home Care Ontario of more than 1,000 people aged 55 and over, 91% would prefer to stay at home if additional support was available. These numbers resemble previous surveys by the National Institute on Aging in which the vast majority of respondents aged 65 and over said they prefer their own home over long-term care homes.