Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Ms. Falk, for that question.
First of all, I want to accept your thanks. It's a privilege for me to give care to our seniors, and it brings much happiness to me and many others. I see it as a great contribution to our country, to which I am an immigrant, and I feel very fortunate to be able to provide care to its elders.
From a long-term care perspective, indeed staffing is a major challenge, and it is not getting any better. Many nurses and personal support workers, or unregulated care providers and others, have gone through one or two COVID tests themselves—I was one of them—and a lot of us have become sick. In addition to that, a lot of us have not been able to carry on with double shifts and continuous work. Many of my colleagues have worked non-stop since the onset of COVID. At times that starts to weigh, so we are losing staff because they are burnt out.
In addition to that, we also know, and I think my colleague alluded to it, that we work with a workforce in long-term care that is mainly female. The majority of them are unregulated, and we know that those groups of people come from the cohorts or the environments that sometimes struggle with life. Many of them are immigrants. Many of them hold more than one job in order to pay the bills. They cannot take a full-time job in one long-term care home because there are no full-time jobs available. There is full-time work, but there are no full-time positions available.
As a result, they do not have sick leave or benefit plans, or a pension for that matter, and they have to take more than one position in order to meet the ends. [Technical difficulty—Editor] who really have to rush from one place to another and are not committed to one specific home. That leads to discontinuation of care, and that always affects the resident and the family negatively. That is one very big problem that we have.
In addition to that, moving into COVID, we also had serious shortages of staff in long-term care. [Technical difficulty—Editor] found that even if nursing homes were staffed to the best of their ability with all positions filled, we still would only give 60% of the care that is required to provide quality care. Canada has the lowest staffing recommendations across all of our western countries in mandatory staffing for long-term care homes.
As of today, in long-term care, we are short about 60% of registered nurses, 50% of registered practical nurses and about 20% of personal support workers. It is impossible to provide care if you do not have the people to provide the care. That's a very short, first main problem that I see happening in long-term care.
It's very difficult to attract my colleagues to long-term care, if I cannot guarantee full-time permanent jobs with a pension plan, sick leave or anything else, and where you will always work a double shift. It's very hard to do.