Nurses call for action on staffing crisis

The current pandemic has hurled us towards a full-blown nursing crisis.

In virtually every part of the country, in every health-care setting, there isn't enough frontline staff to provide the quality care that Canadians need. Our health-care system stands at the brink of catastrophe.

We need to stop planning in the dark when it comes to health care. The longstanding nurse staffing crisis calls for better national planning. A federal health workforce agency — modelled after what already exists for Canada's construction industry — would allow us to better manage staffing needs and design a health-care system that is truly responsive to the needs of Canadians.

The current crisis extends beyond existing vacancies; an alarming number of nurses are looking for the exit. A national PRE-COVID survey found that 60 per cent of nurses intended to leave their jobs within the year, with more than a quarter saying they wanted to leave nursing altogether. To stem the bleeding, we need an immediate national moratorium on layoffs in nursing and innovative retention strategies. While recruitment strategies are vital, the successful onboarding of new grads relies heavily on the mentorship provided by more experienced nurses.

Without urgent action by governments, more nurses will choose to leave the profession. Canadians, meanwhile, will only see the quality and timeliness of care worsen.

Before the pandemic, nurses were already struggling with impossible workloads, excessive and often mandated overtime, rampant workplace violence, and a persistent lack of workplace protections.

These conditions have had an alarming impact on nurses' mental and physical health. Of the more than 7,000 nurses across Canada surveyed in 2019, nine in 10 reported symptoms of burnout. Levels of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and PTSD symptoms were similar to those for police and correctional officers.

The pandemic only added to nurses' psychological load. Watching patients, residents and colleagues fall ill or die, worrying about potentially taking COVID home to their families, and not being provided with the proper PPE to do their jobs safely — all of it took a further toll on their mental health.

The pandemic also led to countless hours of overtime, back-to-back 12-hour shifts, and the cancellation of scheduled leaves; nurses have had no downtime.

In early 2021, about 20 per cent of all job vacancies in Canada — almost 100,000 positions — were in the health-care and social assistance sector. Nursing positions often remained vacant for 90 days or more, a trend that is likely to continue as more nurses leave the profession.

Most recently, years of government neglect culminated in provinces pleading with each other for nurses and employing staff who lacked specialized skills as a stop-gap.

Nova Scotia is facing an unprecedented shortage of nurses, both in rural and urban centres. Pandemic pressures have pushed senior nurses, who typically fill any gaps in hospitals and elsewhere, into full retirement. Younger nurses are being left to care for critically ill patients without sufficient on-the-job experience and mentoring to practice with confidence. Many of these nurses are already considering alternative careers.

While politicians applauded nurses when the cameras were rolling, many undermined us behind the scenes. With COVID-19 not even in the rear-view mirror, some provinces are already looking to balance their budgets on the backs of nurses, through wage freezes, rollbacks and layoffs.

As nurses, we want to give our patients the care they deserve, we want to be safe when we go to work, and we want to be treated fairly by our governments and employers.

On Sept. 17, nurses will rally in Nova Scotia and across Canada to demand the transformative change needed to make the health-care system better for everyone. Our universal, publicly funded health-care system has long been a source of national pride; we hope all Canadians will stand with us to fight the erosion of this important national treasure.