2024 Budget Consultation – What are we asking for

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Parliment building

On May 30, HEU presented to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services about the 2024 BC Budget. 

Each year, the committee holds province-wide consultations to seek the views of people in B.C. and presents a final report with recommendations to the Legislative Assembly. 

We made three key recommendations for the 2024 Budget. 
 

First recommendation: Common standards for working and caring conditions in long-term care 

Two decades of privatization and sub-contracting in seniors care has resulted in a fragmented workforce subject to a wide range of working and caring conditions. Levelled up wages during the pandemic were needed to ensure low wage employers could retain staff when public health officials restricted workers to a single site. And while wages continue to be levelled up, benefits and working conditions vary widely across seniors’ care. 

  • HEU urges government to support the restoration of common standards for working and caring conditions in long-term care.  
  • Government could restore common standards by ensuring benefits, and measures related to working and caring conditions also match the applicable B.C. public sector collective agreement; and by ending the sub-contracting of care and support services.  

We believe these measures would improve recruitment of new workers and the retention of experienced staff to promote continuity of care for residents.  

Second Recommendation: Build more public long-term care homes 
  • To improve transparency and accountability in long-term care, HEU strongly supports building more public long-term care homes and improving accountability for private operators. 
  • The B.C. Seniors Advocate highlighted how for-profit operators’ expenditures for wages and direct care hours were far below that of non-profit operators. 
  • It’s time to re-establish balance in the ownership patterns in long-term care and improve the transparency and accountability of contracted operators by:  

-guaranteeing all new long-term care builds are public or non-profit;  

-developing a capital building program with access to public financing and capital funding grants to help non-commercial providers build and renovate more seniors’ care homes;  

-creating a standardized funding approach across health authorities and ownership types; 

-requiring funding for direct care is spent on direct care or that surplus funds are returned to the health authority, and strictly defining operator profit and eligible appropriate expenses; 

-developing accurate, verifiable, and standardized reporting for direct care hours, and monitoring and enforcing staffing levels;  

-and enhancing government oversight and public reporting of facility-level financial information.   

Third Recommendation: Recruitment and retention 
  • Invest in promising practices to aid recruitment and retention. 
  • Staffing shortages, heavy workloads, and a lack of support means too many new hires quickly leave the job and existing staff burn out. 
  • HEU advocates for recruitment and retention strategies such as: 

-developing a cohesive and equitable approach to career laddering for current health care workers;  

-accommodating health care workers to move from one area of health care into another with greater demand, without losing years of service, accompanying benefits, and job security;  

-creating more permanent and full-time positions; 

-establishing mentor positions to provide consistent, high-quality orientation and ongoing peer support; 

-independently evaluating the Health Career Access Program to identify successes and make improvements; 

-continuing to work with Indigenous partners to recruit more Indigenous workers, improve cultural safety in health care, and establish other best practices to support and retain Indigenous workers; 

-exploring innovative solutions to the development of workforce housing; and 

-collecting and reporting data on health care worker turnover, sociodemographic information, and work environment and experience to better target recruitment and retention initiatives. 

The 2024-2025 budget will be tabled by the BC NDP government in early 2024. 

Read the full report here: