Retention, not recruitment — keeping the nurses we have

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This article was published 02/10/2024 (549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A nurse’s burden is both heavy and difficult. The hours and days are often long and the imposed overtime of being mandated for an extra shift is a fact of life for an increasing number of them.

The patient loads are heavy to the point that on every shift, someone is getting short-changed, one way or another.

When things go well, it can be an extremely rewarding career choice. But the opposite also holds true — when everything falls short, the job can be heartbreaking nearly beyond imagining.

And the stakes are always so high.

Because people die. Because people don’t always get the kind of care they deserve in the health-care system, and nurses are on the front lines taking the heat from the public. This is a high-stress job for a reason.

So perhaps we should be looking at the canary in the coal mine and asking ourselves what’s coming next.

The talk about improving health care always centres around “more” — recruiting more doctors, finding more nurses, bringing more paramedics into the ranks, not to forget the constant need to funnel more money into the system.

Perhaps we should be talking about, oddly, less. Or, to be correct, fewer.

Nurses are a good example. A recent study by the Montreal Economic Institute found that slightly under 30 per cent of nurses entering our health-care system leave by the time they reach 35. That’s a staggering turnover.

Anyone in business can tell you that successful staff retention pays for itself. You don’t have to invest time and money in hunting for new staff, and you don’t have the inevitable costs and time of training those new employees on your systems and policies. You don’t have the period of time it takes for them to reach their full stride in a new and unfamiliar working environment. And you don’t have to take people fresh out of the education system and help them through the transition to full-time employment.

But imagine an employer having to do that on a full-time basis — bringing in new employees to replace close to 30 per cent turnover by the time your employees reached the age of 35.

There are industries that do that — the hospitality and tourism industry comes to mind — but many of the high-turnover jobs don’t need years of involved training.

Nursing and health-care jobs are of a different sort, and health-care roles are particularly challenging to fill. Right now, Health Canada is forecasting that there will be a shortage of 117,000 nurses by 2030 — and that means we should be working to keep every single nurse (and other medical professionals, for that matter) that we possibly can.

Retaining nurses will be even more important as the available pool of nurses disappears.

Manitoba may be doing well in comparison to other provinces, where even higher percentages of nurses are fleeing the profession before they reach 35, but that’s no excuse to sit back and think we’ll be able to buy our way out of the problem with an endless supply of new hires.

Because the supply is drying up.

Instead, our health-care system should be focusing on supporting and mentoring the nurses we do have, and finding meaningful ways to address their concerns about work-life balance.

When nurses are interviewed about leaving the public system and going into private health-care companies, one of the main reasons they give is that they’re able to control when they are working. In the perpetually stretched public system, administrators — already dealing with short-staffing — are making it impossible for nurses to have that control, and thus in the process make the problem even worse.

So when you speak of recruitment and retention in the health-care system, the focus from Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara on down must be on retention, first and foremost. Finding solutions to that problem may also make the profession more appealing, long term.

Stressed and exhausted employees will consider giving up their profession and look for a way out. As such, every effort should be made by the Kinew government to try to keep the medical professionals we have, instead of allowing our health-care system to bring nursing staff to the breaking point.

There isn’t an endless supply of nurses, and it’s a horrific waste of their skills, training and knowledge to have them leave so soon.

» Winnipeg Free Press and The Brandon Sun