The municipality’s long-term care home is continuing its recruitment push to meet its care targets.
The municipality’s long-term care home is continuing its recruitment push to meet its care targets.
Mary Alice Searles, director of senior services at Riverview Gardens, said the facility should be seeing some results in the near future through a new co-ordinator position.
“We continue to work on meeting our target hours of care set by the province. We are bringing on a recruitment and retention co-ordinator to assist with hiring new recruits which should be in place over the next few weeks,” she said in an email to The Daily News.
“This position will focus on attracting staff to Riverview Gardens, retaining them after hired, and will promote working in health care as a career.”
The challenges associated with booking time off has been another concern that employees have raised in recent times, particularly during the pandemic over the past two years.
Searles said a consultant is now in place to assist in that regard.
“We are working with Workforce Edge Consulting to help us create work schedules that give employees predictability in hours, allows for work-life balance, and that is appealing to new hires,” she said.
Homes are required to provide three hours of care per resident per day by this month, followed by four hours of direct care per resident per day by 2025.
For 2022-23, the province is fully funding the hiring of 40 new front-line positions, with a full-time equivalency of 29, at Riverview Gardens, including personal support workers, registered practical nurses and registered nurses.
While trying to weather staffing challenges, long-term care facilities throughout Ontario remain under COVID-19 precautions for staff and visitors.
This includes mandatory masking and other measures that have loosened in most other settings.
“We continue to follow the Ministry of Long Term Care rules, which require masks be worn in the home, screening in, and rapid antigen COVID19 testing,” Searles said.
“We are watching things closely as the community loosens restrictions and encourage everyone to get a booster.”