Attracting staff is the main challenge for Au Chateau care home

For Au Chateau, a long-term care home in Sturgeon Falls, finding and keeping staff is one of the main challenges the facility has been facing. “As we find it harder to recruit qualified staff,” explained Au Chateau’s housing administrator, Jacques Dupuis, “the burden on our current workers increases, making it even more difficult to recruit and retain – this has become a vicious circle.”

Dupuis mentioned this during his presentation at West Nipissing’s municipal council meeting, when he stopped by to provide council members an update on the home. The municipalities of West Nipissing and Temagami own Au Chateau.

Dupuis outlined some specific challenges facing the facility. Staffing is a concern, as hiring bilingual personal support workers (PSW) has been “difficult,” and “school enrolment has declined tremendously” in PSW programs, Dupuis explained.

Compounding the issue is that patients are requiring more care, particularly in regards to mental health supports. Six out of ten residents “suffer from some form of dementia,” Dupuis noted, “and that number is growing at a rate of 2.5 per cent per year.”

“Even more troubling,” he added, is the rising rate of aggressive behaviours residents are exhibiting. “On average, 46 per cent of residents exhibit aggressive behaviours and about 11 per cent are considered severely aggressive.”

The increased aggression increases the risk to resident safety, and makes providing care more difficult for staff. Currently, Au Chateau employs 200 people, 73 of which are PSW’s, 35 are registered practical nurses, and 10 are registered nurses.

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The provincial government provided a goal to long term care homes to provide an average of four hours of care per resident per day. The plan is to achieve this goal by January, 2025, Dupuis said. Currently, Au Chateau provides “on average 3.4 hours of direct care” for each patient each day.

As for attracting more staff, Dupuis admitted “there is no magic solution.” However, offering more support for training, and allowing on-the-job training for PSW’s would help. The provincial government “needs to develop a long-term, Integrated Health Resources strategy in close collaboration with residents, family, front-line staff and Colleges and Universities.”

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More needs to be done to address staffing issues, but Au Chateau has been able to hire six full time PSW’s in 2022, as well as four full-time registered practical nurses. This year, they added another six full-time PSW’s. However, to create the full-time positions, “we have depleted our part-time pool and thus when full-time need replacing, we do not have enough part-time to fill the shift,” Dupuis said.

David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.