Over three years, the total hourly wage for PSWs will increase by up to $4.00, raising the base wage of publicly funded PSWs to at least $16.50 per hour by April 1, 2016.
There are approximately 100,000 PSWs working across Ontario’s health care system. More than 34,000 have jobs in the home and community-care sector.
CCS has graduated over 30,000 Certified Caregivers/PSWs in Ontario and around the world. These PSWs have over 350 hours of anatomy and physiology and 800 academic hours on topics such as nutrition, family care, palliative care, dementia care and ongoing conditions, lifts and transfers and more.
“We know that Ontarians would prefer to receive care in their own homes and communities and personal support workers play a critical role in making this possible. Our government is committed to working closely with our partners to better support PSWs, including improvements to their wages in recognition of the important role they play in our health care system.”
– Dr. Eric Hoskins, Minister of Health and Long-Term Care
Dr. Eric Hoskins has left the house, but his commitment lives on to improve client and caregiver experience while creating better quality, trained PSWs, as does investment focused on increasing capacity and improving performance.
The commitment to self-directed care could seriously change the community delivery of care from the 80/20 rule I spoke of before with little funds trickling down to the two most important people in the care process: the client and the psw. Changing by removal of the multi-level agencies the 20% into administration and 80% of every health care dollar out to the client and Certified Caregiver/PSW. We will now see a difference in the cost per client and the delivery system will be working for Ontarians.
