Manitoba Nurses Call for Action on Staff Shortages and Poor Working Conditions

Action at Manitoba legislature on Canadian nurses day of action, September 17, 2021. (MNU)

For many years the Manitoba government has been making cuts to the health care system while reorganizing to open up the system to increased privatization. Nurses report short-staffing so serious that many beds and hospital units are closed because of the shortage of nurses to staff them. The shortages were already significant before the pandemic and now have reached a critical level.

The Manitoba Nurses Union (MNU) which represents more than 12,000 nurses in the province reported on September 17, the nationwide Nurses Day of Action, that there were more than 2,200 vacant positions in the province at that time, about 1,500 of those in Winnipeg, and that earlier in September seven nurses left Winnipeg's St. Boniface Hospital in a nine-day period. The President of the MNU, Darlene Jackson, said that she herself was planning to retire, "even though I would have stayed in the profession another five years if I was working in a reasonable situation where I wasn't mandated to work 16 hours every shift I go to work."

While nurses are working short-staffed and forced to work excessive overtime, hospitals are increasingly bringing in nurses from private agencies. Information provided to the MNU by Shared Health and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority reveals that the number of hours worked by agency nurses doubled in the last four years, from 181,378 province-wide in the 2017-18 fiscal year to 368,775 in the 2020-21 fiscal year. In Winnipeg alone the number of hours worked by agency nurses increased from 9,493 in 2018-19 to 66,359 in 2019-20, an almost seven-fold increase. Agency nurses are paid more, have more flexibility in work assignments and are not forced to work overtime.

The use of agency nurses ostensibly alleviates the nursing shortage but once making money is the motive of every arrangement brought into being everyone suffers the consequences. At present, in most cases agency nurses are assigned to medical and surgical floors and not to high-intensity areas like Emergency Departments and Intensive Care Units. Often that means that hospital nurses assigned to medical and surgical floors are reassigned to those high-intensity units for which they are not properly trained, and their places taken by agency nurses. Then hours and working conditions become even more untenable and this is designed to push even more nurses into the private system. Soon, all those nurses also will be pushed to the limit and have no defence whatsoever. The time to oppose this is now. 

Nurses oppose the diversion of public funds to private agencies and are demanding increased investment to recruit and retain nurses and for improved working conditions including the elimination of mandatory overtime and arbitrary shift reassignments that make working conditions intolerable and are driving nurses to quit.

This article was published in

October 4, 2021 - No. 91

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/WF2021/Articles/WO08913.HTM

    

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