Quebec nurses push for lower patient ratios, fewer overtime calls
Véronique Brouillard says she loves being an auxiliary nurse.
But between the constant requests to work overtime, calls that interrupt her vacations, and a heavy and stressful workload, the 36-year-old mother of three said she’s exhausted, stressed — and furious.
“We have no life,” she said. “One day off in a week, and they call us four times (asking us) to come in for extra work. I’ve had enough.”
She was one of several dozen health-care workers who stood on a Montreal street corner on Friday night waving signs and loudly expressing their anger over staff shortages and working conditions that they say are causing them to burn out and are compromising their ability to care for patients.
While concerns over nursing shortages and burnout are nothing new in Quebec, the issue has resurfaced just as the province prepares to enter a fall election campaign.
Some nurses have taken to social media to vent their frustrations, and the head of a provincial nurses’ union is once again calling on the health minister to lower nurse-topatient ratios and end the practice of mandatory overtime.
A Facebook post by a young nurse named Emilie Ricard was shared over 56,000 times after the woman from the Eastern Townships posted a picture of herself in tears, giving a sarcastic thumbs-up after a night-shift in which she said she had to care for more than 70 patients alone.
Nancy Bédard, head of the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec, blames government budget cuts for exacerbating a long-standing problem.
“They’re always asking us to reorganize, to do more with less,” she said in a phone interview. “We’ve hit a wall, a level where we say we can’t go further.”
Brouillard, whose job includes handing out medication and assisting nurses, said the staff shortages in the Montérégie region where she works are so acute that she can no longer take the time to sit down and soothe an agitated patient. “It’s like an assembly line, I distribute my pills, ‘bang, bang, bang,’ ” she said.
Health Minister Gaetan Barrette met with the nurses’ union earlier this month and later expressed a willingness to work with nurses to resolve their concerns.