Staffing issues at core of PMH plan

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This article was published 06/04/2023 (1031 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Westman’s health authority has released a fresh plan that emphasizes recruitment and addressing the needs of health-care professionals over the next five years.

The strategic plan is a guideline for Prairie Mountain Health, said chief financial officer Dan McGregor. The yearlong development process involved consultations with staff, the board of directors as well as local and Indigenous communities.

“It’s like the road map of where we are today, where we want to get to, and what we need to do to get where we want to be at the end of the five years,” said McGregor.

While the plan was under construction, PMH had to identify certain priorities, or pillars, which are the backbone of the overall strategy. Those pillars need to align with the provincial government’s objectives in health care.

The four pillars for PMH are patient experience, improved wait times, fiscal sustainability and recruitment and retention of staff, which McGregor said is one of the main areas of focus.

There are about 7,000 employees working in PMH in the 20 acute care hospitals, 43 long-term care homes and nine transitional care sites.

As part of its strategic plan process, PMH invited staff to respond to an online survey, which garnered responses from 262 employees who identified current strengths and weaknesses, as well as anticipated challenges for the next five years.

Teamwork, hard-working employees and providing quality care were among the strengths while shortage of staff, lack of consistency or efficiency of some processes and high workload were identified as weaknesses.

Burnout or low morale, staff turnover and shortage of staff are the anticipated challenges for PMH over the next five years, which may be hard to hear but is an important part of the process, said McGregor.

“As much as there can be a hesitancy of reaching out to the staff to get their feedback because there are some strong opinions, I think it’s a good exercise and we need to hear that.”

The weaknesses identified in the survey resonated with a former PMH nurse, who now works in the Southern Health region. Allison, who didn’t want to give her last name for fear of reprisal, said she quit in frustration because of last-minute shift changes and feeling like her concerns “fell on deaf ears.”

“There was a lot of mismanagement, no communication, nurses not feeling heard,” said Allison. “The last two weeks I worked in the PMH region, every shift had an agency nurse as well as a health-care aide, whose only facility training was a tour of the supply closet.”

McGregor said he acknowledges the staffing issues, the importance of engaging workers to try to implement change and moving away from the “top-down feeling” some employees have when decisions are made without their input.

When compared to the last strategic plan that was released in 2021, the current vision has more focus on recruiting and retaining additional health-care professionals. McGregor has high hopes for this following a Manitoba delegation’s trip to the Philippines in February to recruit nurses. Two representatives from PMH were part of the group.

But he said people shouldn’t expect the issues addressed in the strategic plan to be fixed overnight.

“We want to move forward in all the areas, but it’s a five-year plan. So we have to start making moves, but it doesn’t all have to be today. There are only so many resources we have to implement change. So we need to figure out what’s in year one, year two, three, four and five.”

PMH’s five-year strategic plan can be found online at http://bitly.ws/CC96.

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