All right.
Mr. Chair, committee members, good morning.
My name is Linda Lapointe. I am vice-president of the executive committee for the FIQ, the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec. I am responsible for the workplace health and safety of our healthcare professionals. We represent close to 76,000 nurses, nursing assistants, respiratory therapists and perfusionists working in all healthcare settings in Quebec. We thank you for inviting us to this study.
Over the next 10 minutes, we will briefly discuss federal healthcare funding, and then delve into the issue of safety for healthcare professionals in these difficult times.
As far as federal government funding is concerned, Quebec's health network has been under severe strain since the outbreak of this pandemic. Were it not for the will and know-how of those working on a daily basis, it would have been impossible to provide the high-quality care the public needs in these difficult times. Each day for several weeks now, they have brilliantly met this challenge, despite the many constraints with which they have to cope.
Apart from the magnitude of the pandemic and the speed at which it is spreading, the weaknesses in our network are largely due to the lack of funding, both provincially and federally, in recent years. For several years now, the FIQ has been asking its federally elected representatives from all parties to increase the health transfer to help finance healthcare and services to at least 25% of provincial spending. Unfortunately, this very legitimate request has fallen on deaf ears. Given the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak, adequate funding would undoubtedly have helped facilitate the day-to-day work of the healthcare professionals we represent, and helped provide the public with the care they have a right to expect.
Last week, the Minister of Health, Ms. Patty Hajdu, noted that, over the past decades, various federal governments have underfunded preparedness for public health emergencies. As a result, Ms. Hajdu said, the national emergency strategic stockpile does not have all the equipment needed to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude. We regret that this reserve has not been regularly reviewed and that the amounts invested are still not adequate. A well-provisioned national stockpile would have been useful, especially since Canada depends largely on foreign industry for the supply of personal protective equipment.
Nevertheless, we applaud the federal government's willingness to address this dependency by encouraging Canadian industry to produce this equipment that is essential to the work of our healthcare professionals in the future.
I will now talk about the safety of our healthcare professionals. As we eagerly await Canada's self-sufficient supply of personal protective equipment, we feel it is appropriate to recall the words of Justice Campbell, commissioner of the SARS Commission, which we echo here today. Until the precautionary principle is recognized as a basic principle of workplace health and safety in Canada, our healthcare professionals will be at risk.
Given the timidity of certain recommendations on personal protective equipment by the Public Health Agency of Canada, or PHAC, particularly its refusal to apply the precautionary principle to the risk of airborne spread of COVID-19, the FIQ took the opportunity to express its dissatisfaction on February 7 in a letter to Dr. Tam, the PHAC's chief official. As we emphasize in that letter, we continue to believe that PHAC leadership would have been helpful in the current context.
In Quebec, from the very beginning of this crisis, the FIQ was concerned about the recommendations and the language used in some recommendations issued by the Institut national de la santé publique du Québec, the INSPQ. They did not factor in airborne transmission, as the PHAC did, and the Quebec recommendations expressed concern for a potential shortage of personal protective equipment.
What is even more alarming, however, is that airborne transmission of the virus remains concealed today, even though current research shows that this form of transmission is happening. Moreover, a panel of U.S. experts has just released its opinion on the subject. The INSPQ's recommendations must quickly be adjusted to reflect this scientific evidence. Otherwise, the workers' rights to safety will be violated.
For the past few weeks, the scenarios by the Institut national de la santé publique du Québec have rapidly turned into improvised, last-resort solutions, particularly when it comes to respiratory protection devices. I'm thinking specifically of the prolonged use, or reuse, of single-use disposable masks.
The INSPQ also recommends the use of expired masks and suggests that disposable masks be disinfected, all of which is endorsed by the public health department.
We question these public health directives, which seem to separate public health from the protection of healthcare professionals, or even set them in opposition. We now understand that they are the result of an obvious lack of preparation and that this puts our healthcare professionals at risk and in peril.
We are very concerned that, in emergency situations, the precautionary principle, which must always guide good practices for infection protection and workplace health and safety, is being set aside. No pandemic, no supply issues can justify putting our healthcare professionals at risk of infection.
The picture we want to share with you today is not a happy one; it is raising a great deal of concern among our members. In 2003, during the SARS epidemic, the sheer uncertainty of what we knew about the virus was a source of considerable stress and anxiety for healthcare workers. Today, that same uncertainty is combined with a real global shortage of essential personal protective equipment.
Healthcare professionals were already overworked at the beginning of the pandemic, and they are now facing significant overloads. While many people are seeking care, healthcare professionals themselves or their loved ones may become ill.
Our members are under a lot of stress. They feel unprotected in the face of the virus. Right now, they feel that, if they are not well protected, they may become infected and they may infect other patients, colleagues or family members. Even more worrisome is that this feeling is not unfounded: employers deny them access to protective measures when they could provide better safety.
This equipment is sorely lacking most particularly in residential and long-term care centres, or CHSLDs. Our healthcare professionals are already coping with a staff shortage in these settings, and they must now provide care to very vulnerable clients with minimal protective equipment. These shortcomings largely explain just how fast the virus is spreading in those settings and, correspondingly, they are putting more stress on healthcare workers.
Helping people in need can be rewarding, but it can also be difficult. Healthcare professionals may experience fear, sadness, frustration, guilt and burnout. These are reactions that can be expected in situations of this magnitude and uncertainty.
In conclusion, it must be said that the recommendations arising from the various reports on the SARS epidemic in 2003 do not seem to have been well assimilated. We hope that those that will emerge from the current pandemic will be implemented so that we can be better prepared to deal with other pandemics. It is essential that our healthcare professionals be able to provide quality care to the public in a safe work environment where all the necessary equipment is available.
On a more positive note, we would like to recognize that the federal government moved swiftly to take measures to support workers during this lockdown period. Some of the measures have undoubtedly helped partially reduce the stress of a loss of income for some of our professionals' spouses and enabled them to continue providing quality care to the public.
Thank you.