Jacob Serebrin, The Canadian Press Posted Friday, January 27, 2023 5:42 am EST
MONTREAL – Several parts of the country are trying to attract nurses from other provinces, but the head of a national nurses association says poaching won’t solve anything unless working conditions are improved.
“We know that nurses face inadequate working conditions and that’s the main reason many leave their jobs,” said Sylvain Brousseau, president of the Canadian Nurses Association, in an interview Thursday. “If working conditions and retention are not in focus, new nurses recruited from other provinces may find themselves wanting to leave their jobs.”
This week, Horizon Health Network, one of two health authorities in New Brunswick, held three-day recruitment events in Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. His goal to attract 120 nurses to the province includes the promise of an attractive life near the ocean with financial incentives of up to $20,000.
A spokesperson said recruiting from outside New Brunswick is not new and that nurses are also being recruited through partnerships with universities in Maine and India, and steps are being taken to retain workers. The province’s other regional health authority, Vitalite Health Network, says it will attend several career fairs in Quebec in the coming weeks.
Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the province will begin automatically recognizing the credentials of health care workers registered in other provinces and territories. “A doctor from British Columbia or a nurse from Quebec who wants to come and work in Ontario should not face barriers or bureaucratic delays to begin providing care,” Ford said at a Jan. 19 news conference.
Newfoundland and Labrador introduced incentives in an effort to attract home health workers with provincial ties, while Quebec said it is looking to hire staff internationally.
“All provinces in Canada face the same challenge of workforce shortages in their health care systems,” Health Minister Christian Dubé’s office said in a statement. “It is in everyone’s interest to recruit internationally. In the meantime, we continue to work to make our network an employer of choice and improve working conditions.”
Brousseau said nurses need better pay, more support staff – so they can focus on patient care – and responsibility for fewer patients.
“Thirty years ago in surgery I had six patients during the day, seven to eight in the evening shift and 12 in the night shift and now in some places there are 15 during the day in the surgery or 10. It’s too many,” he said.
Brosseau said he would also like to see an end to practices like mandatory overtime, which remain common in Quebec, and nurses pressured to work seemingly optional overtime.
He said the nurses’ association was not opposed to nurses going to another province to work and that he was calling for barriers between provinces to be reduced – but that would not solve the problems.
“It’s not by poaching nurses from one province to (another) that you’re going to solve the health system crisis we’re going through right now,” he said. “By giving them better working conditions and a better healthcare environment.”
Ivy Lynn Bourgeois, a University of Ottawa professor and director of the Canadian Health Workforce Network, said efforts to recruit nurses across provincial borders are a symptom of a broader problem.
While it’s not the first time Canadian health care systems have sought staff elsewhere in the country, the shortage of nurses and other health care workers is worse than before.
“I think what’s new is the extent of the problem and that every province is in these circumstances and it’s not just a Canadian problem. It’s happening all over the world,” she said in an interview Thursday.
Solving Canada’s nursing shortage must start with retention, she argues; recruitment alone cannot solve it. “It focuses on one part of the challenge, to bring in more, and we don’t look at all those who are leaving,” she said. “It’s not a long-term strategy.”
Bourgeois said governments need better data for workforce planning and that federal agencies, such as the Canadian Institute for Health Information and Statistics Canada, can be tapped to give provinces better tools.
Mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios would also help retain nurses, she said, but could lead to longer wait times in the short term.
“I think as a society we need to have a crucial conversation about how to manage this crisis going forward,” she said.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on January 27, 2023.
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