Grandview coping with ER closures

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This article was published 16/06/2022 (1565 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Grandview Health Centre’s emergency department closed again over the weekend — a situation likely to repeat itself until nursing vacancies are filled.

The health centre posted a notice on its emergency department doors last week stating there would be no emergency services from 8 a.m. on June 10 to 8 a.m. on June 13. The notice said anyone needing emergency department services should call the health centre to find the nearest open emergency department, or call 911.

The closure was due to staffing shortages and the region doesn’t have on-call staff that can fill vacancies on short notice, a spokesperson from Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) stated in an email.

Grandview has been dealing with a shortage of health-care personnel and as a result, emergency department closures, said Mayor Dwayne Bomak.

This is a problem across the province, he said, but for small communities like Grandview, it means residents must leave the town for medical emergencies. Most of those people end up going to Dauphin, about 45 kilometres east, he said.

“This has been going on for a month or two now, and our health centre has been quite stable with doctors and nurses before this,” he said. “It’s a great hardship for many of our residents to leave for medical treatment, but Grandview’s isn’t much different than most facilities. We are having shortages with nursing staff, which causes the ER to be closed from time to time.”

He added there wasn’t much notice of the closure given, but PMH does what it can to keep them informed. Sometimes it comes down to a staff member phoning in sick, meaning the hospital is unable to fill the vacancy on short notice.

Smaller facilities like the Grandview Health Centre have a harder time staying open because they have fewer staff. When one or two nurses call in sick or are called away by PMH to fill a vacancy elsewhere, it means they are now short-staffed and must close due to a lack of service.

Closing the emergency department is a threat to the community’s overall health, so like many communities, Grandview is trying to recruit nurses. Bomak said they are working with PMH to attract more nurses to Grandview.

The community also added an incentive program, which includes a signing bonus of $20,000 split over two years for any registered nurse who signs a two-year, full-time contract. A licensed practical nurse receives a $10,000 bonus split over two years.

One issue nurses had with working in Grandview was a lack of housing, so as part of the incentive, Bomak said the town purchased a home for nurses to rent while they are stationed there.

These incentives have worked, with some nurses choosing to stay in the community because the incentives helped them settle there, he said.

“I think it’s helped because we’ve had a number of nurses that have stayed past their two-year period.”

The recruitment efforts don’t wait for the nurses to come to them. Bomak said he and PMH have reached out to the University of Manitoba and University College of the North to talk directly with nursing students about job offers.

Having more nurse training spots added to schools is great to see, he said, but that doesn’t help them in the short term. All they can do now is keep working with what they have.

It isn’t just shortages that are causing periodic closures, said Sue Stirling, co-ordinator of Grandview Healthcare Solutions. The system itself is not serving the health-care needs of communities. It has become too centralized, and many of the decisions are being made unilaterally, including moving staff to other locations with little notice, leaving gaps in other areas.

“Whatever solutions we are coming up with, they need to have everyone at the table: union reps, doctors, community members, nurses,” she said.

The system is being run on a business-type model, said Stirling. If PMH wants to do that, she suggested business-type solutions. Pointing to international companies like Tim Hortons, they have policies to run the whole system, but franchises are run locally by owner-managers. This would help communities have more control over their own health-care decisions because they are actually in the community.

Another suggestion that came from doctors is having a physician fill in when a nurse is unable to come for a shift. Doctors told her they would rather have two doctors and no nurses for the sake of keeping the emergency department doors open.

These problems have been years in the making, she said, and they won’t be fixed overnight.

“This isn’t about fixing everything all at once. It’s about getting us to a better place than where we are now,” Stirling said. “We’ve had some success with recruiting and retention and that has helped, but we need to think about the system itself.”

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