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A personal support worker (PSW) in a long-term care facility described difficulty coping with added stress, increased workload and longer hours to keep up care.
“There’s definitely extra stress and some days, you just break down and start crying,” she said. “Our workload is crazy, and the girls are just running on the floor to keep up.… Before the pandemic, we had a shortage of PSWs and now we have more and more people going off work because they’re afraid. A lot of the staff are working double shifts.”
Ontario’s health-care system has been eroded by economic strains, under-staffing, diminished capacity and regulatory inadequacies.
Health-care workers at risk of COVID-19 exposure are without adequate protections, including personal protective equipment (PPE), administrative and engineering controls and lack of adherence to the precautionary principle, as explicitly recommended in the SARS Commission Report.
The controversy around the aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 affected health-care workers’ safety.
N95 masks, which protect against virus transmission, have not been widely available to health-care workers as authorities debated the science that established airborne transmission.
Several health-care workers said requests for N95s were ignored. Supervisors warned nurses, as detailed by one: “You are not to wear an N95 mask; you do not need it, you are fine to be wearing the mask with a shield and if I catch you with one on again, you can be fined.”
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