Field visits by phone, locked-up PPE flagged by nursing home staff in 1st wave, documents show
CBC
When the surge of COVID-19 cases began to hit long-term care homes in the spring of 2020, nursing home workers were calling Ontario's Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development to blow the whistle on unsafe working conditions, according to documents obtained by CBC News.
In response, the ministry, tasked with ensuring the safety of workers in the province, advised its inspectors to conduct field visits by phone — even as outbreaks in long-term care facilities multiplied.
"I feel that they let us down," said a worker from a Revera-run nursing home, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
"If they would have actually been able to come in and see the environment that we were working in, and see how people were suffering, they would have seen the health and safety inadequacies that were happening."
Through a freedom-of-information request, CBC News obtained from the ministry the health and safety reports from nine long-term care homes in eastern Ontario, covering the period between March and November 2020.
Many of the documents — including reports from some of the region's hardest-hit homes — contain hundreds of blacked-out pages.
But the emails, reports and handwritten notes still illustrate key issues at several homes as the pandemic began, including complaints about a lack of proper protective equipment (PPE), poor communication with staff, fear of reprisals for speaking out about issues and concerns about staffing shortages.
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