Does Ontario have too many under-regulated health workers? - Healthy Debate - 0 views
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by Wendy Glauser, Mike Tierney & Michael Nolan (Show all posts by Wendy Glauser, Mike Tierney & Michael Nolan) March 31, 2016
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In recent years, various health care professions have called for better regulation – including paramedics, personal support workers, physician assistants and others. Inadequate regulation has led to confusion that can put the public at risk, representatives of the professions say.
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For many paramedics in Ontario, the Emergency Health Services Branch of the Ministry of Health sets the rules around how paramedics transport people and provide basic care like managing wounds, while base hospitals delegate more advanced care activities like administering medications and inserting breathing tubes.
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Other non-RHPA occupations have less oversight. Personal support workers, who provide services including assisting with bathing, helping patients adhere to their medications and other tasks in the home, don’t have any provincial body to monitor their training or to ensure they’re practising appropriately, explains Miranda Ferrier, president of the Ontario Personal Support Worker Association (OPSWA).
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these doctors tend to err on the side of under-delegation, knowing that if something goes wrong, they’ll be held accountable.
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A personal support worker could be fired because of an accusation of abuse or neglect and they can literally get up and walk down the street and get hired by another agency and they wouldn’t know anything about it,” says Ferrier.
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The OPSWA conducts a national criminal record and credential check for the 16,000 PSWs registered with them, but registration is voluntary. There are over 80,000 PSWs in the province who haven’t registered with OPSWA, Ferrier explains. “We would like to see one curriculum for all PSWs,” she says. “There should be expectations upon them for retraining and we should have the ability to blacklist ones that get charged with abuse.”
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however. Chinese medicine practitioners were granted self regulating status in 2013 and naturopaths in 2015 – but not without controversy.
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The problem is that not just in Ontario but broadly, in Canada, we’ve defined regulation in health care as self regulation and other countries don’t do that.”
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New legislation should also allow smaller professions that can’t afford to maintain an RHPA-defined College to have title protection, says Grosso. And the voluntary oversight the professions currently do recognized legally, she adds. “When it comes to public protection, size should not matter,” says Grosso.