Former case manager says high workload is hurting Canadian veterans
Global News
``It's hard to put your head down at night and feel like you did your job properly,'' Lucy Hirayama told The Canadian Press.
A former case manager with Veterans Affairs Canada is speaking out about the overwhelming caseloads, lack of support and toxic work environment that she says are putting severely disabled veterans at risk.
“It’s hard to put your head down at night and feel like you did your job properly,” Lucy Hirayama told The Canadian Press in an interview. “You’re there to help the veteran, and you can’t help them because you’re overloaded with work.”
Hirayama’s decision to come forward follows a series of articles by The Canadian Press that looked at some of the most pressing challenges facing veterans today, including the large number of former Armed Forces members with complex needs assigned to individual case managers.
The series referenced testimony from the Lionel Desmond inquiry in June from Desmond’s case manager about the challenges she faced as she juggled dozens of files before the Afghan war veteran shot and killed his wife, daughter, mother and himself in January 2017.
It also included firsthand accounts from some of the 16,000 ill and injured veterans with case managers about the added difficulties they have faced, in large part because the people tasked with helping them are too busy to respond to requests for assistance.
Yet while the problems are well known within Veterans Affairs, Hirayama says not enough is being done to address the issue and support overworked case managers before they themselves burn out and leave.
“You go into a workplace because you want to help people,” she said from her home north of Calgary. “And we end up becoming so damaged working in that toxic work environment that we walk out of that place with mental-health problems ourselves.”
Hirayama joined Veterans Affairs as a case manager in Edmonton in May 2019 after seven years as a federal parole officer. She says she was told at the time that she should have no more than 30 veterans assigned to her, but that did not prove to be the case.