Inside the Circle – September 23, 2025

We are happy to share that after more than 10 years of dedicated service, Eleen Darroux, PSW, is retiring from Circle of Care.

Since 2013, Eleen has given kind and dependable support to our clients and their families. Her commitment to supporting the independence, dignity, and well-being of those in our community has made a lasting impact. Her clients and coworkers will miss her very much.

As Eleen begins this new part of her life, we want to say a big thank you and wish her a happy, healthy, and enjoyable retirement.

Congratulations, Eleen!

Just a reminder to please take a few minutes to fill out the Global Workforce Survey. This survey gives you the chance to share your thoughts about your workplace. Your answers will help us understand what is going well and what we can make better.

The survey is anonymous (your name will not be shared). Thank you in advance for your participation!

Please complete the survey by October 31, 2025. 

If you have already booked your spot for your massage session, please check your schedule to make sure you can still come. If something has changed and you are unable to make it, please cancel your booking. This way, someone else can join. Spots are limited, and cancelling helps everyone get a chance.

Tap HERE to cancel or reschedule, if needed.

Subway – Line 2: Multiple Night/Weekend Closures 

• When: September 2 – 30, 2025
• TTC Changes: Subway service along Line 2, West of Kipling Station, will be impacted, including early-weeknight and full-weekend shutdowns. Please read the TTC Subway Service Advisories for more information.

Starting in late September and continuing through October, you will see a new way to log in to Dayforce. This is for extra security, and to help keep your information secure.

You will see three screens when you log in to Dayforce:

• First, enter our company ID: circleofcare 
• Second, enter your Dayforce username.
• Third, enter your Dayforce password.

(Please see the picture above for more details.)

You have the right to annual vacation time, as stated in the Collective Agreement. Your vacation time and vacation pay depend on how long you have worked with us, and this is reviewed every September. The following chart is a breakdown of vacation benefits: 

Please note that the time you book off for your vacation is not paid, as vacation pay is paid out on an annual basis in September. If you would like your vacation pay to be paid out in advance, you can email payroll@circleofcare.com. 

For any other questions about vacation time entitlement, please refer to the Collective Agreement.

Knowing how to stay calm and safe during challenging or negative situations is very important. It helps protect you and the people you support.

Here are a few tips to protect yourself and your client:

• Remain calm and use your words.
• Try to understand what the other person is worried about.
• Stop a bad situation before it gets worse.

The guide also has advice on how to take care of yourself and where to find support.

In this short video, Dr. Brené Brown explains that empathy means feeling with people, which helps us build real connections. She also points out that sympathy (feeling for someone) can sometimes create distance instead of closeness.

This is an important lesson, especially in caregiving. When we take time to understand our own feelings, we can care for others better. Even small acts of empathy can make a big difference.

Has someone gone above and beyond at work? Give them a High Five!

The High Five program lets you publicly recognize staff members for their outstanding work. High Fives will be posted in your weekly Inside the Circle newsletter.

To give a high five, just click on the button below or use the link in the rotating banner on the Portal home page.

Please note: We do not accept anonymous submissions for this program. High Fives must be submitted by an individual person, whether they are a staff member or member of the community.

High Five for PSW Imelda Magbanua and Maria Teresa Bartolome

Thank you to Imelda, Maria Teresa, and the whole Circle of Care team for helping our family during a hard time. Our mother is 92 years old and a Holocaust survivor. Last month, she fell at home and went to the hospital. She was not badly hurt, but the fall made her feel very stressed, and she could not sleep well. We are very thankful for the kind care she received. The team quickly gave her more help during the day and also at night. This made a big difference. Thank you for your support, kindness, and for taking such good care of our mother. It means so much to us. – Client’s Family 

When PSWs call into the office we have to wait more than the 90 seconds, way more than that time! Can something be done to eliminate this issue?

We are sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulty with reaching someone live. We strive to answer as many calls as possible but at times we experience significant call volume increases. If you have an emergency situation and you experience no answer when calling the call center, you can also call your CSS during business hours. If you feel that you have been kept on the phone for too long in an urgent or emergency situation, you may submit your phone number and date/time of the call for us to look into as well as the reason for your call.

What is the point of opening up my availability even more if I only get 2 clients a day? Some PSWs have 7am-11pm availability only to get 5 clients a day. It’s a waste of our time waiting for nothing. Stop telling us that depends on the case load or clients canceled the visit. Every week you have new hires new PSWs that get more hours than people who have been working a long time at Circle of Care. I have known a few clients that wanted me to be their PSW that aligned to the time that they needed but every time they called the office you told them I was not available and that a different PSW was coming to see them. Stop telling us to call the coordinator or CSS they don’t care at all, the calls always go to voice-mail and they don’t even bother to return my call.

Circle of Care covers a very large area, and our new employees work in different areas of Toronto, Scarborough, Etobicoke, North York, Thornhill, Richmond Hill and more. Our recruitment team focuses on hiring PSWs for areas that have less staff, and more clients, so that we can provide these clients will regular visits, and so that other PSWs don’t have to travel so far from client to client. So this is one reason why we are hiring new staff.

One of the other reasons is that the number of PSWs available to work on any given day is not constantly growing as we hire new staff – employees can take time off for holidays, medical leave, maternity leave, other leaves of absences, etc. We need to be able to replace these visits while staff are off, and that’s not always going to be possible without hiring new staff.

We are also not trying to keep clients from having their preferred PSWs. If you are available to take the visits, we would like to assign you to these visits. It’s possible you have not updated your availability for the Service Coordinator to see. There may also be a lack of communication between you and the client, where the client is not willing to change their visit time to accommodate the time slots when you would be available. You can either reach out to Alicia (x232) or Tariq (x256).

Whenever you send in a question you always say reach out to your CSS. I’m not wasting my time calling them, it’s too valuable to waste.

Thank you for sharing your feedback. Your CSS is the best point of contact to address and resolve your questions, as they have the information and context to support you directly. We encourage you to reach out to them so that your concerns can be addressed appropriately.

How do I change my home address in the app? I tried multiple times to change my address, but still can’t change it.

If you need to change your mailing address, you can submit an Update Address Form on Dayforce.

You will need to log into Dayforce first. Then, you can find the form by navigating to the Profile section, clicking on Forms, and then scrolling down to the Personal section.

I wish to make inquiries on how we are given working hours. I sincerely feel some PSWs are favoured. I get less than 20 hrs a week, yet when I shared this with my fellow workmates, they have an overflow of hrs. We have the same availability schedules. Schedules should be balanced between all workers.

If you are not receiving enough hours, and have already spoken with your coordinator, you should escalate this so an investigation can be done to see if there are hours available in a nearby caseload. You can connect with one of the Service Coordination Supervisors – Alicia Pelletier (ext.232) or Tariq Shafi (ext. 256).

One day I happened to visit a client that I had last visited 4 months back. She asked me whether I was back to working for Circle of Care. I told her that I had never left. She said that she had asked about me and been told that I had left. Why did this happen?

Without knowing details about your specific situation, this was perhaps a case of a mistaken identity. Perhaps the client didn’t give your correct name or perhaps you have a common name and the Service Coordinator thought that you were someone else.

Why don’t you call us directly when adding clients on our schedules? What if we are far from home and the work phone is at home yet you have calculated your time for the program you have? Give us notifications that make sound on our phones not just for sweeping through the phone to refresh. Thank you.

Please ensure that you are carrying your work phone on you during the days that you are scheduled to work. As per the PSW/Homemaker Schedule Policy, it is expected that your work phone is fully charged and that you are logged into the app at all times during your availability. You are expected to check your schedule frequently throughout the day and to refresh the information to make sure that the most up-to-date information is presented.

As per the policy:

• The phone is required to be checked 1 hour prior to start of your availability and at the beginning of your availability
• It is expected that the phone be checked every 30 minutes until the start of the first assigned visit if there are gaps and after each visit is completed
• If there are no additional visits scheduled after the last visit and check out for the day, the PSW will not have any new visits scheduled unless they are offered a visit by phone call by their Service Coordinator within their stated availability.

Have a question? Submit your questions or feedback anonymously below!

Please note that it may take us longer to provide some answers. If your question hasn’t been answered yet, we will get back to you as soon as we can.