Menno Place Campus
Image Credit: Google Maps
December 04, 2020 - 6:30 AM
A COVID-19 outbreak in an Abbotsford long term care home forced Karen Biggs to look for innovative ways to recruit new staff.
She’s tried for months to recruit laid off workers for Menno Place. She lost 39 casual employees after the government restricted workers to a single site.
Facing additional shortages when staff in one long term care unit came down with COVID-19, she posted a notice in the Friends and Family section of the Menno Place website, inviting them to apply.
That was at 1 p.m. Saturday. Three days later, she had 48 applications.
“The enthusiasm is amazing,” Biggs, the CEO of Menno Place Campus, told iNFOnews.ca “It’s very, very moving. We’re getting really qualified people, people saying ‘I run my own business.’ They just have a passion about trying to help out.”
She’s even had grandchildren from Alberta asking if they had to self-isolate if they came out to help clean.
While some applicants may be hoping it will give them a chance to see their loved one more, most are people just want to give back and are quite willing to work in any of the Menno units.
Menno Place Campus is owned and operated by the Mennonite Benevolent Society. It has six buildings on 11 acres in Abbotsford with 700 residents and 675 staff.
Two of the buildings are dedicated to long term care, with seven units between them.
On Nov. 17, a resident went into hospital for a possible broken wrist, coming back five hours later carrying COVID-19, Biggs said.
By today, 16 of 35 staff along with 16 of 45 residents in that unit have tested positive. The other three units in that building have also been locked down, as a precaution, but the disease seems to be confined to the one unit.
That’s created a severe staffing shortage. Even while some are returning after their 14-day quarantine period, others are having to go off.
Biggs had tried recruiting laid-off workers from a local hotel earlier in the pandemic. While workers were willing to send in resumés they weren’t willing to go for an interview because they were on government support programs and just needed to show they were applying for work, she said.
With a flood of applications, they now have to be vetted and make sure things like flu shots are up to date.
Once hired, they have to go through about a week’s training on things like cleaning, safety, dealing with hazardous materials and how to clean around residents who may be violent.
Given the amount of training required, Biggs hopes these will become permanent employees.
While some may be hired to work in the affected unit, others will be deployed where needed. Once working in one unit, employees cannot go to work in other units.
That means, during the current lockdown, the staff are working a lot of overtime. The new hires will be trained to assist with feeding as well as cleaning.
Biggs is the past president of the B.C. Care Providers Association, which represents privately-owned care facilities in the province.
She’s received many calls from other operators who are saying things like ‘why didn’t I think of this.’ Many want to be kept posted on how this works with thoughts of trying it themselves, she said.
That could create a whole new recruiting strategy in an industry that’s hard pressed to get enough staff at the best of times.
“It’s not a sexy career and, until you get into it, you don’t know the warmth and wonder of serving these people,” Biggs said. “I went into it as a young nurse because I fell in love with seniors. Not everyone feels that way towards the elderly.”
The benefit of turning to friends and families is that they’ve had some experience with life inside a long term care home and can better understand that “warmth and wonder,” she said.
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