Staffing shortage causes delay

Chez-Nous puts plans for long-term care beds on pause

WELLINGTON, P.E.I. – A plan close to a decade in the making, to open long-term care beds at Le Chez-Nous Cooperative, will not be going ahead after the home was unable to hire nurses to staff the wing.

“Obviously, the feeling is not very good,” said Gilles Painchaud, president of the Chez-Nous board. “We don’t foresee, in the near future, that we’re going to be able to attract people.”

The 12 long-term care beds for the home were first announced in December 2018 and a new wing was built a year later. In the middle of searching for nurses to staff the long-term care wing, a fire in January 2021 severely damaged the retirement home.

“We were pretty well ready to open,” said Painchaud. “Obviously, the people that we had found to work, mainly nurses, had to find work somewhere else.” By August, the facility was rebuilt and ready for residents to move back in. The work included the long-term care wing, with all the beds and equipment it needed; the only thing left to do before it could officially open was to hire nurses.

The home began its search for bilingual nurses that fall, but by the end of the year, had been unsuccessful at filling the four-to-five positions it was looking to fill.

In January 2022, hoping to turn the situation around, Chez-Nous announced that it was offering incentives to encourage bilingual nurses to apply.

It would give $5,000 to any nurse that signed, as well as $1,500 to any Islander who referred a successful candidate.

The deadline to apply was mid-March, with the goal of opening the long-term care beds by June 1. By late June, though, the wing remained unopened and unstaffed.

“We’ve been trying to recruit heavily since the beginning of the year,” said Painchaud. “We hadn’t even got one application.”

The hiring difficulties, said Painchaud, are not specific to Chez-Nous, but exist across the Island.

“It’s very hard to … find somebody to work, to fill the position we need,” he said.

As the facility is in a primarily-French community – with many of its residents speaking French – the home, specifically, was looking to hire bilingual nurses.

Painchaud – as well as Nicole Arsenault Bernard, an external consultant hired to assist in the hiring process – believe that requirement was an added difficulty.

Nurses who don’t speak English as a first language, Arsenault Bernard explained, need to pass an English proficiency test and show they can communicate medical information and write the patient charting in English – even if they work in a French-language setting.

“That is an issue we’ve been seeing,” Arsenault Bernard told SaltWire in a January interview. “A lot of the candidates that we’d like to recruit, we know that they won’t pass that English language proficiency test.”

Although the home is unable to operate a long-term care unit in the facility, there is no intention of letting the new wing go to waste.

Instead, said Painchaud, the home has asked the province to change the license to repurpose the wing for community care.

That arrangement, though, is by no means a permanent one, and the plan to see a long-term care wing at Chez Nous remains in the back of Painchaud’s mind.

“We’ve asked that our license be put on hold for (five) years,” said Painchaud. “If we can find personnel to work within two, then we’ll open it.”

In Painchaud’s opinion, having long-term care available in the Évangéline region is important for keeping seniors in their community – especially, he added, for Francophone seniors.

The home, as well, while no longer actively recruiting for the time being, is still encouraging interested applicants to apply so that the long-term care beds can open sooner than later.