MEDIA ADVISORY: Health care staff infections up nearly 20% in one month as study on pandemic workers’ trauma released Thursday in Sudbury

Event Information

Begins: 3 December 2020 @ 10:00 AM

Location: Sudbury, ON

SUDBURY, ON –/COMMUNITYWIRE/– In November the number of Ontario health care workers infected with COVID-19 rose by 1,381, nearly a 20 per cent increase.

Researchers of a ground-breaking new study (being released in Sudbury Thursday) of health care staff working in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic last spring are urging the provincial government to better protect health care workers to mitigate trauma.

The researchers chronicled (in real time) how front-line workers coped as COVID-19 unfolded. The study also makes key recommendations on what we must do differently as Ontario’s under-resourced health system faces the COVID-19 second wave.

Study co-author Michael Hurley, the president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU/CUPE) will be in Sudbury at the Holiday Inn for a (live, in-person) media conference. The study’s principal authors Dr. Jim Brophy and Dr. Margaret Keith will join the media conference remotely to release their findings and answer media questions.

Brophy and Keith, who are affiliated with the University of Windsor, have previously published two studies on violence in Ontario’s hospitals (2017) and long-term care homes (2019).

Who:  Academic researchers Jim Brophy and Margaret Keith, with Michael Hurley, President of OCHU, the hospital division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Ontario

What:  Media conference to release new study on health care workers’ lived experience during the pandemic

Where: Holiday Inn – Georgian Room E, 1696 Regent Street

When:  10 a.m., Thursday, December 3, 2020

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For more information, please contact:

Stella Yeadon, CUPE Communications, 416-559-9300