NDP won’t budge on nurse overtime

Despite a 30 per cent vacancy rate for nurses in the Prairie Mountain Health region, the province is forging ahead with a plan to end mandatory overtime for health-care workers.

During an unrelated press conference on Wednesday, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara told reporters the government believes Manitoba has enough nurses to commit to the plan outlined in the previous day’s throne speech.

“We’ve got the nurses in the health-care system to do this, and we’re going to keep hiring as many nurses as possible, including welcoming nurses from other jurisdictions to our province from the United States, internationally educated nurses,” Asagwara said.

“There are many folks now who are looking at Manitoba as their top choice, not a flyover province, because our government is taking these steps.”

As of last month, there were 650 vacant nursing positions in Prairie Mountain Health, with licensed practical nurses accounting for 353 of those positions and registered nurses for 273, according to data from the Manitoba Nurses Union.

There were also 11 nurse practitioner vacancies and 13 registered practical nurse vacancies, the data shows. Prairie Mountain Health has a total of 2,174 positions for nurses.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson, who advocates for nurses in the province, says ending mandatory overtime is “little ambitious” and is concerned about how the government plans to move forward.

“I think it’s a positive move … but I feel as if, right now, we do not have enough nurses to actually make that happen, and until we are fully staffed, it’s going to be very difficult to say no mandating,” Jackson told the Sun on Wednesday.

Even if nurses aren’t mandated to work overtime, many feel obligated to or guilty if they don’t work extra hours to help relieve their colleagues’ workloads and ensure patients are getting the care they need, she said.

Jackson said nurses are given no choice but to work extended hours — sometimes after they’ve already clocked in for a 12-hour shift.

“If you go in for an eight-hour day shift, you may end up working an eight-hour evening as well,” she said, adding that she knows nurses who’ve worked a night shift and have been mandated to work the following day shift.

Since April 2024, the province has hired 481 net new nurses, the province said in a news release earlier this year. Last month, the NDP government said it has added 3,400 net new health-care workers since it came to power two years ago.

In Tuesday’s throne speech, the province also pledged to legislate staff-to-patient ratios in priority areas like hospital emergency rooms, improve patient safety by making a charter, introduce digital health cards and launch a new patient portal so people can access their immunization and lab results.

Jackson said she doesn’t think the province needs to have a patient safety charter, but rather the means to ensure there’s appropriate staffing, nurse-to-patient ratios, a safe facility to provide care, and a continued focus on recruitment and retention.

“We still have vacancies in this province and until every vacancy is full, I don’t see us being successful in providing safe patient care for every Manitoban,” Jackson said. “It’s great to have it in writing, but where’s the teeth in it?”

Jackson told the Sun that it doesn’t matter where you go in the province because issues like violence toward nurses, filling vacancies and poor nurse-to-patient ratios impact health care across Manitoba — and Prairie Mountain is no exception.

There are also “pockets where the vacancy rates are extremely high,” especially in areas like Dauphin, she said.

Prairie Mountain Health, which employs approximately 8,200 health-care workers, refused Wednesday to provide a comment in response to the throne speech.

Right now, nurse-to-patient ratios are broken down by the number of nurses working divided by the number of patients and depends on the unit. For example, a nurse working in the ICU may care for a minimum of four patients, but without provincewide nurse-to-patient ratio legislation, patient safety can be put at risk, Jackson said.

“I personally believe that every patient in Manitoba, whether you’re in acute care, whether you’re in the community, whether you’re in a long-term care facility, deserves to be cared for by a nurse who’s working under the minimum nurse-patient ratio system where a nurse has the appropriate patient load and actually has the time to provide safe, quality care,” she said.

Jackson said she is part of a committee preparing a series of recommendations to be forwarded to the province early next year that will include a template highlighting safe nurse-to-patient ratios depending on the health care unit listed.

» tadamski@brandonsun.com