Competitive bidding for home care is destroying the service it is supposed to provide, say caregivers and their clients.

At a demonstration Oct. 21 at Queen’s Park, home care advocates said government restructuring is funnelling dollars to private companies, not services.

"Employers make promises they can’t keep, and then turn around to their employees and make them work harder, faster, longer, for less," said Barb McCoy, a shop steward for OPSEU Local 274 at the Hamilton Community Care Access Centre. "Do you expect quality care from people that you’re abusing?"

Job security has evaporated under competitive bidding, McCoy told the crowd.

"You have job security for as long as you hold the contract," she said. "You lose the contract, you don’t get a job. It’s deplorable. You just have to jump from company to company to be able to make ends meet."

Job insecurity and health and safety concerns for workers have thrown the system into crisis, McCoy said.

"Health care workers don’t want to work under these circumstances," she said. "So now we’re running into a crunch. We can’t find nurses.

"It’s a terrible situation when you have someone at home dying, and you say, I’m sorry, we can’t send anybody because there’s nobody left to work."

"I knew before my nurses did that they no longer had a job," said Dinah Cotter, of Disabled Women United for Change.

"My nurses were very caring, and that was part of the problem. [The companies] don’t want people that care. They don’t have time."

Cotter said home care rationing was actually driving up health costs by sending many people back to hospital.

"This so-called competitive bidding strategy is nothing but a strategy to lower the wages of people who work in the home-care system," NDP leader Howard Hampton told the crowd. "It’s a strategy to import the American, privatized, health care system into Ontario."

"Home care can not be regarded as a cheap way of providing health care and a cheap way of facilitating the closure of hospitals," he said. "Competitive bidding should be scrapped. Let’s design a home care system that meets the needs of patients, not the profit level of corporations."