The Legault government is once again loosening the purse strings to attract employees in a sector with a labor shortage. This time, accelerated and paid training will aim to recruit 1,000 home support workers.
The 705-hour training (compared to 870 hours usually) will be accompanied by a scholarship of $12,000, paid in three stages, our Parliamentary Office learned. At the hourly rate, this represents the equivalent of a salary of $17 per hour.
Two amounts of $4,000 will first be granted during training, while the last tranche will come with the certificate of professional studies. In exchange, candidates must commit to working for at least six months in the health network.
According to our information, registrations will be open today and classes will begin in the coming weeks in various professional training centers across Quebec.
The Legault government hopes to train these new employees, called health and social services auxiliaries in the ministry’s jargon, in time for fall 2024.
Please note that graduates will be guaranteed employment at the end of the course.
Several programs
The idea of accelerated and paid programs first emerged in the middle of a pandemic when Prime Minister François Legault announced the creation of a short program in order to find new 10,000 beneficiary attendants (PAB) to come and lend a hand to the exhausted staff in CHSLDs.
To date, more than 7,500 workers from this first cohort are still working.
After this first offensive, Quebec relaunched its express training last May, which made it possible to recruit around 3,000 additional employees, by increasing the study grant from $9,200 to $12,000.
However, graduates from these first two waves can only work in CHSLDs or in a Seniors’ Home, due to their much shorter training of 375 hours.
With almost double the number of hours in class, the new group of attendants will be able to work both in establishments and in home care.
First created for PABs, the idea of short, paid training courses has since caught on. Recently, the Minister of Labor, Jean Boulet, launched a similar program in the construction sector, where five employment groups will benefit from a fast track to train between 4,000 and 5,000 new workers.
Gigantic challenge
Health and Welfare Commissioner Joanne Castonguay recently sounded the alarm about the needs in the area of home care.
In a voluminous report aimed at evaluating the performance of government programs in the field, she highlighted that the Quebec state currently only meets 10.7% of the required number of hours. The lion’s share of resources tends to go to CHSLDs.
Table taken from the report “Aging well at home, volume 4”, by the Commissioner for Health and Well-being, tabled in January 2024.
And demand will increase: within 16 years, 365.5 million hours will be needed to care for seniors at home or in a private residence, compared to 234.7 million hours currently.
In her report, Joanne Castonguay also invites the government to review its model. She points out that home care represents only 4.5% of health spending, which places Quebec at the bottom of the pack among Canadian provinces.
“[P]prioritizing home support would be a rational choice in terms of public financing of long-term care, due to the considerable costs of accommodation [en CHSLD]», wrote Mme Castonguay.
Health and social services assistant
- Helps with daily and household activities
- Seeks to promote the integration and socialization of the person
- Ensures hygiene, well-being, comfort, surveillance and general needs
- Prepare meals and do household chores
- May be called upon to install certain equipment for which he is trained
- Inform those responsible of the person’s needs
- Salary: $25.63 per hour