The assistance requested by Quebec in living environments for seniors will have to wait a little longer. The Red Cross is also faced with the shortage of manpower, learned The dutyand is struggling to recruit the workers called in as reinforcements at the end of December.
After the war effort offered at the start of the pandemic in the CHSLDs, the Red Cross agreed just before the Holidays to lend a hand again by making 300 workers available to centers for seniors for four months.
However, three weeks after the start of this deployment, which began on January 10, 46 people were dispatched to three living environments (in Montreal, Saint-Hyacinthe and Trois-Rivières). To this figure will soon be added approximately 25 other responders, who should complete their training next week. The Red Cross will then have some 70 responders, after a month of its new mission which is due to end on 1er may.
“These are not huge numbers at this time. Recruitment is quite difficult,” agrees the Quebec vice-president of the Red Cross, Pascal Mathieu, who cannot predict when all the staff will be on the ground.
“The labor shortage is delaying our operations,” he explained in an interview with Duty.
A more difficult context
For nine months, between July 2020 and March 2021, the organization had provided more than 1,000 workers in long-term care centers in Quebec, thus taking over from the Canadian army which had just been deployed to calm the crisis in CHSLDs.
At the time, recruitment was rapid, recalls Mr. Mathieu. Quebec was in almost complete confinement, which left a large part of the population unemployed and available to contribute. Part of this deployment also took place in the summer, when the students were also willing to work.
“Last year, we found 1,000 people in a few months. We found our world faster than the living environments could accommodate us. Now, it’s a bit the opposite,” says the Quebec vice-president of the Red Cross.
The majority of the working population is back to work. Students are back in class for the start of the winter semester. Added to these challenges are the intensive recruitment efforts of the health network, which offers permanent positions with benefits.
“We are a bit like the firefighters of the network, illustrates Pascal Mathieu. I’m struggling to find my firefighters. »
The office of the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, said he was aware that the Red Cross, like the health network, “is experiencing staff recruitment issues”. “We recognize their efforts,” commented the minister’s press secretary, Marjaurie Côté-Boileau.
The Ministry of Health is itself juggling a drop in the network’s workforce, since many workers are absent due to the virus. Mme Côté-Boileau notes that the government is continuing its own recruitment efforts, with a view to stabilizing the network, and that 1,000 civil servants “have raised their hands and can be complementary to the health network”.
Staff already requested
Minister Dubé called on the Canadian army and the Red Cross for help, at the start of the wave of cases caused by the Omicron variant at the end of December, to compensate for the lack of available employees in the health network as well as in vaccination and screening centres.
The Canadian Armed Forces have deployed 200 soldiers to vaccination centers in ten Quebec municipalities.
The government of François Legault had also called for the help of at least 300 Red Cross workers. The body pledged to reach that number, but warned that it could not exceed it.
Because the Red Cross must also maintain its other pandemic operations, such as the prevention of infections and epidemics in CHSLDs and other centers for the elderly, assistance in Nunavik and the support offered to the itinerant population of Montreal. The organization also responds to an average of three or four residential fires per day in Quebec.
“The Red Cross responds to a thousand and one emergencies. But in the end, each time, it gets in our troops, ”sums up Pascal Mathieu.