Major gaps in Ontario personal support worker registry says the report

Ferrier was aware of the fact that a large number of patients relied on PSWs for their well-being and wanted another registry to be hosted.

Health Minister Eric Hoskins had received a report that said the registry’s annual budget was just over $2.5 million in 2014-15. Reports said that the agency hired to administer the registry did not conduct sufficient background criminal checks, including education and employment records of more than 30,000 PSWs.

Deborah Simon, chief executive officer of the not-for-profit Ontario Community Support Association, which ran the registry said that her team “did the best we could realistically manage with the resources and timeline assigned to us.”

She said “certain parts of the report are inaccurate or lack context to the point of being misleading.”

The registry was launched in 2011 and the then health minister Deb Matthews had promised that the registry would offer greater accountability and transparency and that clients and family caregivers would use the registry to inform their hiring decisions.

But the site’s search function was shut down by the registry and the clients were asked to conduct their own research and screening process to hire a personal support worker.

“The registry did not provide assurance that registered PSWs were competent and safe to practise, therefore, clients and family caregivers could not rely on the registry to make informed choices,” stated the report, which was prepared for the Health Ministry by Britain’s Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care.

While the registry required applicants to provide information about their education and training, they did not stress the need to provide certified copies of training. The registry did not emphasize about the currency of their certification or updating of their training.

The registry neither set the time for which a PSW would be required to work nor there was a policy or procedure in place to suspend registrants or to update the database.

Simon said that her group focused on the government’s primary objective to employ as many PSWs as possible and pointed out that this was one area in which the ministry’s “very ambitious goals for the registry conflicted with one another.”

“For example, the extremely thorough vetting that would have been required for the registry to be a stand-alone solution to ensuring public safety could not be easily reconciled with the requirement that we register as many PSWs as possible, from across the province, at absolutely no cost to the PSW and very little inconvenience to registrants, on a very short timeline,” she said.

Ferrier, who leads Ontario PSW Association was not won over by Simon’s defence.

“As an association, we’re trying to set a standard,” Ferrier said. “In health care, there is no room for being wrong.”

“Right now, with the majority of personal support workers, you don’t know who’s knocking at your door,” Ferrier said. “You’re just trusting they are who they say they are. Mandatory governance is necessary to fix that problem."

“As the association that represents tens of thousands of PSWs in Ontario — we provide standards of practice and accountability — we are more than prepared to work with the government to make that happen.”

Reports said the government was working with its partners on a long-term strategy but no final decisions had yet been made.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)