Keep nurses from being poached: Union

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This article was published 25/04/2023 (913 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A national plan is needed to prevent provinces and territories from poaching nurses from each other, says the president of Manitoba’s nurses union.

That’s just one of the many resolutions that will be presented at the union’s annual general meeting at the Keystone Centre in Brandon this week. More than 500 members will gather to discuss ongoing issues and potential solutions.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson said members will discuss what she called a “health human resources plan” that they hope will be supported by the federal government.

“Every province can provide incentives to poach our nurses, but we don’t want to lose nurses, we can’t afford to lose any more nurses out of Manitoba. So, we have to make sure that we’re all very cognizant of our needs and call on the federal government to help,” Jackson said.

The AGM is held outside of Winnipeg every three years and this is the first time it’s being held in-person since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jackson said it will be an excellent opportunity for those who work in larger health-care facilities to communicate and interact with those in smaller, rural hospitals, and long-term care centres.

“This is a really good way for people to realize that the grass is not greener anywhere, it really isn’t. Health care is in a mess in this entire province, and it’s not getting any better at this point; we’re all in the same boat and in this fight together,” Jackson said.

Privatization and the use of private nurses are also expected to be big topics of conversation at the meeting.

Manitoba often hires private — or agency — nurses to fill staff shortages, and over the last several years, there has been a noticeable increase in this practice across the province, including in Prairie Mountain Health.

In the first five months of 2022, PMH spent $8.6 million on agency nurses, accounting for around 70 per cent of the region’s total amount spent on private nurses for 2021-22, according to data provided by the MNU.

The concern with more services being privatized, said Jackson, is that it drains money and resources out of the public system, which means patient care will suffer.

“This government talks about privatization as a way to save health care. But I look at privatization as the government offloading its responsibility, and under the Canada Health Act, it is the government’s responsibility to provide health care,” she said.

Nurse-to-patient ratios is an item that Jackson said is brought up on a regular basis with union members. The ratio in intensive care units should be one-to-one, but during the pandemic, she said, the ratio was one nurse to three, sometimes four patients, which she insisted was unsafe. Jackson said the ratio needs to be based on patient acuity.

In between the resolutions, voting and educational sessions at the AGM in Brandon, there will be two keynote speakers for the nurses.

One presenter is Françoise Mathieu, a trauma-trained therapist who worked with members of the Canadian Forces.

The other is psychotherapist Sajel Bellon, who believes the pandemic may be over for average Canadians, but it isn’t for health-care workers who are now dealing with the pressure of working to eliminate the backlogs in medicine.

“As a society, we need to provide better education while we’re training and recruiting our people to prepare them to psychologically deal with some of the things that they’re going to see and experience,” Bellon said.

The AGM runs Tuesday and Wednesday, and besides voting on the health human resources plan resolution, there will be discussions about how to partner with the Canadian Federation of Nurses to lobby and advocate on behalf of Manitoba nurses.

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com

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