Nurses Speak Out and Take Action Against Untenable Conditions
Healthcare workers begin negotiaitons with Quebec government, October
24, 2019.
Putting into practice their motto "We're done
working ourselves sick!," nurses who are members of the Quebec
Interprofessional Health Federation (FIQ) spoke out and took action at
the beginning of January against untenable conditions in emergency
rooms in Quebec. On January 5, FIQ nurses in Montreal held sit-ins on
two different shifts at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and a sit-in
at Santa Cabrini Hospital to highlight the crisis that exists in
emergency rooms for workers and patients. This happened after nurses
had been repeatedly forced to work mandatory overtime, sometimes triple
shifts, to deal with the crisis in the emergency rooms. At the
beginning of January, occupancy rate at the emergency rooms was 139 per
cent at Santa Cabrini, 160 per cent in the whole
Montérégie region, and 129 per cent in Montreal.
At Maisonneuve-Rosemont, the emergency room has been in non-stop crisis
for over a year.
While the nurses were holding their sit-ins, FIQ
representatives went to the media to expose the situation and demand
immediate solutions that are favourable to the nurses and the patients,
for which they have been advocating for years. They made the point that
the crisis in Quebec's emergency rooms is not a matter of a sudden
seasonal increase in patients coming in with flu (although this problem
also exists), as nurses have been pointing out for a long time. The
problem, they said, is a systemic overall deterioration in the health
care sector, in which formerly exceptional measures such as mandatory
overtime have become the norm and referred to now as a "management
tool." Such measures are being taken instead of dealing with the
problems in the health care sector. For example, FIQ representatives
pointed out that various hospital administrations have started to call
in nurses who are on leave for various reasons, and retired nurses, in
an effort to deal with the crisis in the emergency rooms and elsewhere,
and have made this into another "management tool." They point out that
even when more full-time nursing positions are created, which is one of
their demands, this is not a solution on its own because only a small
percentage of nurses are going to take these jobs because they fear
that if they take regular full-time employment they will just face more
pressure to stay at work for mandatory overtime. Addressing the
problems would include giving a key role to the nurses and other health
care workers to determine what is needed to establish appropriate
conditions for workers and patients in emergency rooms.
In terms of measures to alleviate the crisis,
nurses are pointing out that wherever their demand for an adequate
nurse-to-patient ratio has been tried as a pilot-project, immediate
improvement was noticed for both nurses and patients. The government
is, to say the least, dragging its feet on the implementation of these
much needed ratios.
The nurses are holding their actions in
conjunction with trade unions such as FIQ tabling their sectoral
demands to the government and management negotiating committees on
health care. The FIQ document is itself entitled "We're done working
ourselves sick!"
The document delineates two negotiation priorities:
- health and safety at all levels of the system:
an essential requirement for health care professionals;
- attraction-retention: obtain winning conditions for health care
professionals.
According to the document, FIQ's negotiation
objectives are:
- organizing the work to ensure health care
professionals' and patients' health and safety;
- enhancing health care professionals' practice and expertise;
- accessing quality positions;
- restoring work-personal life balance to preserve health care
professionals' psychological health; and
- equipping the teams to respond better to health care professionals'
needs.
Among the concrete measures proposed are a
reasonable and safe workload, safe health care professional-to-patient
ratios, stabilizing the work teams, and eliminating the use of
mandatory overtime as a management method. They also include demands
related to days off, scheduling and organization of work time over
which nurses must have a say. In the unhealthy context in which more
and more nurses are getting sick, both physically and psychologically,
the FIQ wants to obtain a commitment that health care professionals'
rights will be properly respected by facilitating access to salary
insurance benefits, real support for rehabilitation and their return to
work. FIQ also wants a review of the administrative and legal
procedures so that the handling of contentious cases (contesting
employers' decisions by grievances or other procedures) is simplified
and sped up.
To access the FIQ document, click
here.
This article was published in
Number 1 - January 15, 2020
Article Link:
Nurses Speak Out and Take Action Against Untenable Conditions
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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