Manitoba Health Care Workers Demand Adequate Protective EquipmentHealth care support staff across Manitoba are calling on the provincial health organization Shared Health to update personal protective equipment (PPE) guidelines to reflect the Public Health Agency of Canada's (PHAC) recognition that COVID-19 can be transmitted through both respiratory droplets and aerosols. Since the pandemic began, 476 health care workers in Manitoba have contracted COVID-19 and two workers have tragically died. "Shared Health's PPE guidelines related to N95 masks have not been changed since July," said Debbie Boissonneault, President of CUPE Local 204 representing health care support workers within the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) and Shared Health. "Health care support staff are catching COVID-19 at work in unacceptable numbers, so something is not working, and it needs to be changed." Despite the new knowledge about COVID-19 transmission and PHAC's guidelines, N95 masks are not provided to health care support staff unless there is an "aerosol generating medical procedure taking place."
CUPE has also filed grievances across the WRHA, Shared Health, Southern Health-Santé Sud, and at Parkview Place calling for stronger PPE. "Frontline support staff are telling us they are not being protected," said Boissonneault. "What we are hearing back from management is 'grievance denied.'" It is unconscionable that despite new evidence of how COVID-19 is transmitted, and all the proclamations that thousands of preventable deaths of seniors in care must not be repeated, the authorities are still refusing such reasonable demands. Health care workers must be provided all protection in line with science and their actual experience of what is needed. (Photo: CUPE)
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"CUPE has been
calling for N95 masks to be immediately provided to support workers who
are working with
COVID positive patients, residents, or clients, and this has not been
happening," said Abe Araya, President of CUPE Manitoba. "Our members
are being denied N95s based on outdated protocols, and this needs to be
changed
now."