Dangerous step or a step toward the best care?
Those are the conflicting labels being applied to a decision by Manitoba’s largest health authority to spend millions of additional dollars on private home-care services.
Home-care aides across the province took notice, with some worried their local health authority may follow the lead of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA).
According to the Winnipeg Free Press, the WRHA will spend $10.5 million to contract private companies to provide home-care services over the next three years, starting in November.
An additional $5.2 million will be spent on home-care services based in the public system, according to the report.
“What I hear from people when they need care is, how do we get the best care in the best place possible?” said Kelvin Goertzen, health minister for the PC government, as quoted by the Free Press. “What I don’t hear from patients is, does the person who is providing me that support have a union card?”
The WRHA told the newspaper the “mixed model” service is meant to complement, not replace, existing home-care services.
The Manitoba Government Employees’ Union (MGEU), which represents home-care aides in the public system, called the decision a “dangerous step” that amounts to privatizing a “major piece of [the] home care program.”
“Manitoba already has a comprehensive, universal public home-care program that is among the best in Canada,” MGEU president Michelle Gawronsky said in a statement. “We should be building on that system, not auctioning it off in pieces. Manitobans need to know just how serious this announcement is. It’s privatization, plain and simple.”
According to the Winnipeg Sun’s Tom Brodbeck, the decision is hardly a departure from past practice.
He reported Manitoba’s former NDP government spent tens of millions of dollars a year on private home care and expanded private delivery under a program that lets patients buy their own services while the province picks up the tab.
One of the private firms chosen by the PCs to provide home care in Winnipeg is the same firm hired by the NDP to provide services when they were in government, Brodbeck wrote.
