Nursing shortage leads to weekend OR closure
Operations in Grimsby limited to weekdays; surgeries in Hamilton postponed
Hamilton Health Sciences will close operating rooms in Grimsby on weekends because of a shortage of specially trained nurses, leaving people in labour travelling to other cities.
Hamilton hospitals also desperately need more surgical nurses, although CEO Rob MacIsaac says the situation is not dire enough yet to prompt closures.
“We’ve had to postpone surgeries,” he said. “We’re tight, but we’re confident we can continue to offer services across our larger sites.”
At a time it is cutting millions of dollars in costs, HHS is offering a $30,000 signing bonus to surgical nurses from other provinces to come to Hamilton General, Juravinski, McMaster Children’s or West Lincoln Memorial hospitals.
“We are trying very diligently to attract more OR nurses,” MacIsaac said.
So far, no out-of-province nurses have taken HHS up on its offer while staff here have been leaving because of the onerous on-call schedule created by the shortage.
West Lincoln has lost so many nurses in the last two weeks that its operating rooms will close Friday nights to Monday mornings starting Feb. 22.
Minister of Health Christine Elliott has directed HHS and the ministry to “work around the clock to find a solution.”
Conservative Niagara West MPP Sam Oosterhoff put the blame squarely on HHS despite MacIsaac calling the shortages a national problem.
“It’s their responsibility to make sure they are recruiting nurses,” said Oosterhoff.
“I’m obviously very disappointed in the fact they let staffing get so low.”
The weekend closures means West Lincoln emergency room patients needing surgery will be
transferred to Hamilton.
The biggest worry is Grimsby people who will travel 40 minutes or more to McMaster to have their babies in case they need an emergency caesarean section.
“That is a huge concern,” said Dr. Joan Bellaire, a family doctor who does obstetrics from the Smithville Family Health Team.
“Some of them barely make it to West Lincoln.”
All midwives and doctors who deliver babies in Grimsby also have privileges at McMaster, and Bellaire says they will follow their patients to Hamilton.
But many currently don’t have privileges in St. Catharines, where many of the pregnant people would rather go.
At least three more surgical nurses are needed at West Lincoln and a minimum of five in Hamilton.
The two communities can’t share operating room nurses because they’re already spread too thin and the distance means they can’t get between hospitals quickly in an emergency.
“We need nurses to live close enough to the hospital that they are available to get there within 20 minutes,” MacIsaac said.
“It does start to be a little bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul if we’re short at all of our sites.”
Grimsby residents were told in November there would be no closures to obstetrics and surgery at West Lincoln after the Conservative government quashed an HHS plan to temporarily move those services to Hamilton for more than two years.
The nursing shortage was not the issue at that time. Instead, it was the need for $8.6-million in building upgrades estimated to take 27 months.
“They said there was going to be no elimination of service,” said Grimsby Mayor Jeff Jordan.
“That is an elimination of service in my opinion.”
He called the weekend closures “devastating” and said it shows West Lincoln isn’t a priority for MacIsaac.
“I think he has manufactured it, in my opinion,” Jordan said about the nursing shortage.
“It’s something that shouldn’t have happened. Hamilton Health Sciences should have been hiring nurses. There were positions that needed to be filled, and I don’t think they actively recruited the nurses.”
MacIsaac called the accusation “complete nonsense” and “preposterous.”
“We are totally committed to the site,” MacIsaac said.
“We’ve been working on getting the site redeveloped for the last five years.”
The local health integration network has already approved the HHS plan to rebuild the hospital and the Conservatives gave $500,000 to begin planning.
MacIsaac says the province has since asked for changes to the plan and HHS is working on that.
“Let there be no doubt about our government’s commitment to a new hospital at the West Lincoln site,” the health minister’s spokesperson, Hayley Chazan, said in a statement Friday.
However, both the mayor and a community action group worry West Lincoln will have the same fate as Chedoke Hospital on Hamilton’s west Mountain. HHS cut it bit by bit until it was no longer a hospital.
“Chedoke Hospital was bled to death basically until the point it was closed,” said Tony Joosse, co-chair of Save West Lincoln Memorial Hospital.
“Is that the intent for the West Lincoln Hospital?”
He questions why HHS allowed West Lincoln surgical nurses to transfer to its Hamilton sites if it ultimately meant that the OR would have to close on the weekends.
MacIsaac said the transfers were allowed because HHS has to respect the career aspirations of its nurses.
“It stinks, it really, really stinks,” Joosse said.
“How do expectant mothers plan to have their babies Monday to Friday? ... I have a lot of crying mothers calling me.”