Michelle Spencer gets emotional when she speaks about the passion of the team she works with at the District of Kenora Homes and Community Support Services.
“Everyone here could go and get a job making more money elsewhere, but they stay because they care and they want to give back to their community,” says the Chief Executive Officer of the northern Ontario organization.
Spencer oversees approximately 350 staff who care for residents at three long-term care homes in Kenora, Dryden and Red Lake, and provide a range of community support services to help people remain independent in their homes.
“At the end of the day, you can look at yourself in the mirror and you know you helped put a smile on that resident’s face, whether it was by helping them with a sweater or saying good morning,” she says.
While some staff inevitably leave for higher pay or less demanding jobs with other publicly funded organizations, Spencer says the majority who choose to stay are motivated by the same thing – the close connection they have to the people in their care.
Spencer says she felt the same pull when she began volunteering in a long-term care home as a teenager while helping her late mother, who had worked in the same long-term care home.
“It’s been in my blood my whole life,” she says.
With a background in human resources management, Spencer joined District of Kenora Homes and Community Support Services as a payroll clerk nearly 20 years ago. She worked her way up the leadership ladder to her current role after launching the organization’s human resources department and overseeing it for many years.
Spencer says municipal support is critical to help the not-for-profit organization address the pay gap in the community health sector, where workers typically earn far less than they could earn for similar positions with hospitals, school boards and other publicly funded organizations.
Under Ontario legislation, municipalities have been required for more than 75 years to deliver long-term care services. Single- and upper-tier municipalities in southern Ontario must establish and maintain at least one municipal long-term care home. In northern Ontario, neighbouring municipalities are permitted to set up a territorial district and form a joint board of management with representation from each municipality and the provincial government to operate long-term care homes.
District of Kenora Homes and Community Support Services has operated under the territorial district model since its inception in 1955. It currently receives approximately 12 per cent of its annual operating funding from nine area municipalities, while the majority of its budget – 71 per cent – is provided by the provincial government. The remainder comes from optional service fees paid by residents and fundraising initiatives.
“We’re fortunate that we have municipal support because it allows us to pay higher wages,” Spencer says. “We need to be competitive with our hospitals and other organizations. We wouldn’t be able to do that without the municipal support that we do get.”
Despite a relatively even playing field on wages, Spencer said recruiting and retaining staff remains difficult because frontline work in long-term care and home care services is often more challenging and physically demanding than in other areas of the health sector.
While the provincial government has increased funding for long-term care significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, Spencer says she’s hopeful government will make more of an effort to better understand how the community health sector supports the broader health-care system.
“It’s important that the government recognizes that long-term care and community health is as important as your hospitals and other health-care providers, because if we don’t all work together, the system doesn’t work,” she says.
