Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Medical and personal care are delivered to residents by a facility's care aides and registered and licensed practical nurses. Most care aides are women and many are racialized and immigrant workers. Care aides perform the most labour-intensive, hands-on care to residents yet they are very low-paid. Starting wages are as little as $12 an hour in New Brunswick and there are large wage variations within provinces. The median wage in Canada is just over $20 an hour but it can take a care aide 10 years to reach that scale.
Care aides perform upwards of 90% of direct care to residents. Their work is complex and requires a high skill level. In Ontario, care aides have six minutes to get a resident up and ready for the day. Within six minutes, they must help transfer the resident out of bed, assist with toileting or change incontinence products, help the resident get dressed, perform oral hygiene and other personal care, and assist the resident to the dining room for breakfast.
Staffing levels in long-term care are typically measured as the number of hours of direct care a resident receives daily. A landmark study conducted in the United States established that the minimum staffing level required to prevent a deterioration in a long-term care resident's health and to ensure good quality of care that is timely and consistent is 4.1 hours of directly worked, hands-on care per resident per day. No province or territory in Canada is currently meeting this minimum standard of care.