Unions want Ontario to reverse hospital COVID policy that allows sick people to work
Global News
"We're asking the province to reconsider and to scrap this policy and to look at the alternatives."
Unions are calling for the Ontario government to reverse a pandemic policy that allows hospital workers to return to work while infected with COVID-19 if a facility’s staffing situation becomes dire.
“We believe that this whole concept is a dangerous threat to the well-being of hospital patients and to those hospital staff who are healthy,” Michael Hurley with the Canadian Union of Public Employees said at a news conference on Thursday.
“We’re asking the province to reconsider and to scrap this policy and to look at the alternatives.”
SEIU Healthcare and CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, which together represent approximately 100,000 health-care workers at hospitals and long-term care homes, wrote to the premier, health minister and chief medical officer of health this week outlining their concerns over the guidance.
The new provincial direction, issued this month in light of unprecedented strain on the health system from the highly transmissible Omicron variant, says health-care employees can come back to work with the virus to deal with staffing shortages.
The guidance suggests that people who are closer to the end of their isolation period should come back to work first and be limited to working with COVID-positive patients. In the most extreme cases, it says people can come back to work earlier than seven days after their exposure to the virus if symptoms have been improving for 24 hours.
Ontario has shortened the recommended isolation period post-infection to five days, but the unions have taken issue with that policy change, too.
In their letter to Ontario officials, they point out that Canada’s chief public health officer has publicly said that the Omicron variant does not appear to be have a shorter infectious period than other COVID-19 variants and that people can remain infectious for 10 days after they develop symptoms.
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