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Liberals quietly scrap PSW registry

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Four years after Ontario’s Liberals promised to protect patients by creating a registry for personal support workers, the Kathleen Wynne government has pulled the plug on the registry, flushing away more than $1 million spent to create it, an opposition critic says.

“The whole thing was useless,” NDP Health Critic France Gelinas said Tuesday. “Nobody knew it existed.

Former health minister Deb Matthews trumpeted the registry when it was launched in 2012.

“I committed to establishing a personal support worker registry to better recognize the work they do for Ontarians,” she said then to the provincial legislature. “The registry will promote greater accountability and transparency.”

But Gelinas said the short-lived registry did neither, that the only one to benefit was a for-profit firm paid to create it at a cost that topped $1 million as far back as 2013.

“The workers were sold a bill of goods,” she said.

Matthews promised to elevate personal support workers (PSWs), who are the backbone of the province’s home and long-term care, providing all non-medical care. A core part of her plan was to shift care out of costly hospitals and into communities.

But Ontario Liberals instead have perpetuated a system in which PSWs make less than minimum wage, their modest salaries eroded by travel time for which they’re poorly paid, Gelinas said. The result has been high turnover and compromised care. A revolving door of PSWs doesn’t know the needs of their patients, who in turn, feel uncomfortable dealing with new faces, Gelinas said.

“Grandpa doesn’t want to strip naked every week to take a bath before a different PSW,” said Gelinas, an NDP MPP in the northern Ontario riding of Nickel Belt.

The Health Ministry pulled the plug quietly — it appears not to be mentioned on the ministry website, the decision instead only reported by those who ran the directory.

“At this time, it is our understanding that the ministry is considering a number of options related to ensuring a safe and competent PSW workforce,” wrote those who ran the registry.

The Free Press asked Health Minister Eric Hoskins to comment about the closing of the registry but he did not.

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