Group items tagged

fairly compensate those who work extraordinary shifts

The agreement brings a return to a 37.5 hour work week

includes a commitment to a Pharmacare tie-in which is comparable to pharmaceutical coverage offered by BC Pharmacare, and a joint process to realize savings in extended benefit coverage

CUPE represents approximately 550 health science professionals in the bargaining association.

CUPE represents approximately 550 health science professionals in the bargaining association. T

The Compass Group, often described as the world's largest contract food services company, locked out over 200 workers at seven B.C. long term care homes on Sept. 29.

just over $12 an hour

without a contract since December 2010

Steelworkers local 2009

At Arbutus Care, as around the world, Compass provides contracted food services to the facility's owners, in this case the Revera company.

come in early and work through our breaks to get our work done

We are all working very hard and we deserve more than a raise of five cents an hour.

casual status

ineligible for the benefits

Compass is paying less than other contractors in the sector

Compass was listed in 2010 as one of the Fortune 500 top global companies, ranked as number 424 in that elite listing. It is listed as number nine in an online article about the globe's largest employers last year, ranking just behind the Agricultural Bank of China and just ahead of IBM.

still generating profit of over a billion English pounds

The Canadian division of Compass, which in 2010 employed over 23,000 "associates," generated $1.4 billion in revenue.

"One of the surprising findings was that when we sequenced all these ... almost half of them fell into the H58 lineage," said first author Dr. Vanessa Wong, an infectious disease specialist with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge. "That (covered) 21 countries. So we were like, oh no. This is actually kind of everywhere." Typhoid fever is a disease that can be spread by only humans who carry the S. Typhi bacterium in their bloodstreams and intestinal tracts.

The disease is now rare in industrialized countries like Canada - which had 144 reported cases in 2012, probably mostly in travellers - but it is still relatively common in the developing world, especially where hygiene and sanitation are poor. While a typhoid vaccine is available, its efficacy wears off after a few years and many people also can't afford the vaccine in the developing world, where the disease is estimated to cause 21 million cases every year and about 200,000 deaths. Typhoid fever can be treated with antibiotics but the overuse of these drugs has fuelled resistance, as bacteria capable of defeating these drugs survive and proliferate. In a 2013 report, the Public Health Agency of Canada found that S. Typhi infections resistant to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin had increased to 18 per cent from 10 per cent the previous year. When asked if H58 has ever been reported in Canada, the agency said it doesn't routinely analyze the strains of S. Typhi cases since typhoid fever is not endemic here.

In countries where H58 has emerged, the superbug is now crowding out weaker strains, thus dramatically "changing the architecture of the disease," Wong said. She said treating multidrug-resistant strains like H58 also requires intravenous antibiotics - an expensive luxury that many people in the developing world cannot access or afford. Resistance against last-line antibiotics will probably also eventually emerge, she added. "If we carry on and the bug continues to evolve, we'll run out of options pretty quickly." She noted that her study also found H58 in Nepal, where devastating earthquakes have now left the country highly vulnerable to outbreaks of diseases like typhoid fever.

For Virginia Pitzer, a professor of epidemiology with the Yale School of Public Health who was not involved with this study, this "important and interesting" new paper underscores the need to tackle typhoid fever.

"The sum of all the numbers is a tightening nursing labour market," Karima Velji, president of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), said in a statement. "Immediate action is needed to stave off the potentially long-lasting trend of a shrinking [registered nurse] work force and its consequences for population health." The CNA is a professional organization that advocates for nurse-friendly public policy.

Andrea Porter-Chapman, CIHI's manager of health work force information, said it is too early to say whether the dip in supply marks the start of a nursing shortage in Canada or a one-year blip thanks to a regulatory change in Ontario. Either way, health policy-makers will need to watch the trends closely over the next couple of years, she said.

"This is the first shift in almost two decades where we've seen a decline in the supply," Ms. Porter-Chapman said. "But the positive side of this is that our work force continues to increase. ... I think [the supply issue] is something that our health-care system just needs to be aware of and monitor."

The supply of registered nurses - by far the most common nursing category - fell 1 per cent. At the same time, the number of nurses actually working in the field continued to climb last year, up 2.2 per cent from 2013, in keeping with the stable growth of the past 10 years.

But not all licensed nurses work in nursing. Some hold on to their licences after landing other jobs, going back to school or unofficially retiring. Last year, the College of Nurses of Ontario, the self-regulating body that oversees the profession in Canada's most populous province, put in place a new rule that effectively bars members from renewing their licences unless they have practised nursing in the province in the past three years. That contributed to an unusually high number of nurses formally exiting the profession in Ontario - 15,836 in one year.

Still, the CIHI report identified some underlying trends that suggest there is more at play. Across the country, a total of 27,757 nurses let their licences lapse last year, while only 25,397 registered anew with one of the provincial or territorial regulators - a net loss of 2,360.

The supply of nurses dropped in six jurisdictions: Newfoundland and Labrador (down 0.7 per cent), Prince Edward Island (down 3.5 per cent), New Brunswick (down 0.9 per cent), Ontario (down 2.6 per cent), British Columbia (down 0.9 per cent) and the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, which together saw a decrease of 3.2 per cent.

Canada's nursing schools are simply not graduating as many students. "We've seen the growth in the number of [nursing] graduates slow down, so it's just under 1 per cent now," Ms. Porter-Chapman said. "This is after five years where the growth was between 6 and 12 per cent."

As well, the number of students admitted to entry-level nursing programs actually fell between 2009-10 and 2010-11, the most recent year for which CIHI was able to obtain national figures. "Will the workplace feel it yet?

Perhaps not. It might take a year or two to see these changes trickle into work settings," said Linda McGillis Hall, a professor in the faculty of nursing at the University of Toronto. "I think this report will actually bring this issue to the forefront again."

The authors of a 2013 commentary in Canadian Family Physician take issue with the “widely cited” claim that only 16%–30% of those who need palliative care receive it. “The fallacy in this claim is the implication that all Canadians approaching the end of life should be cared for by specialist palliative care teams,” state the authors.

Shadd says all health care providers should possess basic palliative care knowledge pertinent to their discipline. “It’s not just physicians… . The nurses, personal support workers, social workers and all of the people supporting that person need to have that education.”

In November 2014, the Canadian Medical Association partnered with the College of Family Physicians of Canada, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the Technology Evaluation in the Elderly Network to obtain a snapshot of the palliative medicine workforce today. They emailed a survey to members of the two colleges and to members of the Canadian Society of Palliative Care Physicians who didn’t belong to either college. The results will be available in May 2015.

The Alliance, a coalition of medical specialists, is calling on provincial and federal leaders to help fashion a "new national vision for health care," one that sets national benchmarks that go beyond the 2004 initiative that targeted five procedures: hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, heart operations, diagnostic imaging and cancer radiotherapy.

We still don't measure nearly enough," said Dr. Chris Simpson, chair of the alliance and a former president of the Canadian Medical Association. "You can't fix what you can't measure."

At a time when more care is moving out of the hospital, Dr. Simpson said wait times for home care and long-term care beds should be monitored by all provinces, as should the number of patients in hospital because they cannot access these services.

When health ministers meet in January in Vancouver, Dr. Simpson said he hopes a partnership to establish such standards will be part of the discussion, rather than just the level of federal funding. "If we have made a collective mistake in the past, it is to say to the federal government, 'It's all up to you,' " he said.

The annual report card provides a snapshot of wait times across a range of measures gathered from provincially available information this summer. In doing so, it highlights the variation in the information available among provinces, and this year also notes that the federal government - responsible for delivering health care to First Nations, refugees, veterans, Canadian Forces and inmates in federal prisons - provides only limited data on its own performance.

The study, which gives a grade to provinces across a range of procedures, finds those provinces that got high marks last year - Saskatchewan, Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador - continue to do well.

Both studies point to the success of Saskatchewan in cutting wait times as evidence of what can be done with a focused effort and both note that the improvement came from more than increased funding.

In five years, the number of patients in Saskatchewan waiting more than six months for surgery dropped by 96 per cent, the Alliance report card finds, thanks to a $176-million investment over four years and also because of innovative practices. Bacchus Barua, a senior economist at the Fraser Institute and author of its wait-time study, said measures such as a pooled referral system helped give Saskatchewan the shortest wait times in the survey.

The report from the Fraser Institute is based on a survey of specialists and tracks the time between the initial referral and the appointment with a specialist as well as the time between seeing a specialist and treatment. At the national level, it found the median wait time from referral to treatment was 18.3 weeks, almost the same as the 18.2 weeks recorded in 2014, but almost double the 9.3 weeks recorded in 1993 when the survey began.

Across Canada, wait times have stabilized, but they have stabilized at a very high level," Mr. Barua said

Saskatchewan had the shortest total wait at 13.6 weeks and Prince Edward Island had the longest at 43.1 weeks, although the small sample size in PEI makes that result less reliable. Among specialties, the longest waits were for orthopedic surgery at 35.7 weeks and the shortest were for patients in line for radiation oncology at 4.1 weeks, the study said.