It surprised me too when I came to work for CUPE, but it is a shocking reality across the health system. The practices do differ from one province to another. One factor that influences this is the way in which the licensing of facilities works by provincial health departments. Often the licensing approval is based off the scheduled shifts, not the actual hours worked. The facilities are funded for a base level of care provided in terms of the number of hours.
We've seen many instances of where sick calls have not seen the worker replaced, or even where employers have put policies in place saying they will not replace the first one or two sick calls on a specific unit. Ostensibly, when they do that, they believe they're offsetting the overtime costs they incur in other places, but the end result is that we very regularly have people working short-staffed in care facilities. There's no effort being made to replace them. Too, it's not always a matter of the employer being unwilling to do it. The availability of staff in the sector is also a problem. The recruiting strategies that we have are not sufficient to provide enough people into our system to make sure that the facilities have enough people on their casual and part-time list to pick up the slack when facilities are short.