Nurse official slams province for cuts to RNs
The head of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario is ringing an alarm bell that the province must halt the slide in the percentage of registered nurses.
Doris Grinspun, CEO of the RNAO, brought her message to a celebration of National Nurses Week on Sunday at Willistead Manor.
Grinspun said she will lead a news conference Monday morning at Queen’s Park to address the issue of RNs being replaced with less-skilled registered practical nurses.
“It’s something that absolutely must stop,” she said.
The RNAO head said the organization will also release the “largest ever publicly available database of all the research for the past 70 years on the impact of registered nurses” on patient outcomes, organizational outcomes and financial outcomes.
This comes on the heels of a report issued last year by the RNAO called Mind the Safety Gap, which supported putting patients first and strengthening primary and home care. But because not much has happened since it was released, “we are issuing this tremendous database, the statistics for the province and the trending and really ringing an alarm bell that acute care, cancer care patients … absolutely need to be looked after by an RN,” Grinspun said.
“The research is conclusive on that.”
Research also shows the province is trending with a “significant decrease” in the number of RNs and an increase in the number of registered practical nurses “which in some settings is good but overall for the province is not.
“The last eight years we have dropped about 10 per cent in the ratio of registered nurses, which is significant,” Grinspun said.
Rachel Wiens, a 20-year-old nursing student at the University of Windsor, said she was attending the high tea luncheon to learn more about the opportunities that may await her upon graduation.
“I’m here today to learn more about the future of nursing in Ontario,” Wiens said.
“And I honestly came to hear Doris speak. I’ve heard a lot of great things about her.”
Bev Faubert, a best practice long-term care coordinator who works to support longterm care homes, said nursing is always evolving.
“We’re celebrating with Doris because this is nurses week and it’s an opportunity … to network with everybody and to see some of the successes we’ve made and to celebrate those successes.”
Those successes include an expanded scope of practice that allows nurse practitioners to prescribe controlled substances in some situations.
Grinspun said having RNs able to do independent prescribing is critical for pain management and palliative care and assisted dying cases.
“Just imagine what that will do for timely access,” she said.
Grinspun said long-term care facilities need to have “a significantly higher proportion” of registered nurses and registered practical nurses, suggesting 20 per cent RNs, 25 per cent RPNs and one nurse practitioner per 120 patients, working alongside the remaining unregulated care providers.
“People (in long-term care) are very, very complex today,” she said, adding that by providing the type of care people in nursing homes need will lessen the chances of them ending up in emergency rooms.