Burnt-out Canadian nurses are shipping out for better working conditions and pay | Globe & Mail - Batsakhi Roy:
July 5, 2022 - "When it comes to her work life, Maha Hassan is in a better place. She quit her job as an emergency room nurse at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto earlier this year to work as a travel nurse at a hospital in Texas. Now, she is getting paid three times her salary in Canada and working only three shifts a week – 36 hours – as opposed to the punishing 70-80 hours she was working in Toronto.... [S]ays Ms. Hassan[,]. 'In Ontario, you must work two days shifts, two nights and then you get five days off. I would spend most of my time just recovering from these shifts because we wouldn’t get breaks'....
"Ms. Hassan, like many of her peers, was thrust into the thick of the pandemic as an ER nurse at St. Michael’s.... [She] recalls the relentless pressure she and her fellow nurses were under at that time. The ... ER was often short 10-12 nurses and those present would be working for 12 hours without a break.... With St. Michael’s Hospital being a Level 1 trauma hospital, critically ill patients were coming in all the time.... Ms. Hassan started looking at her options and decided to make the move to Texas....
"In a recent survey by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), 87 percent of more than 2600 hospital registered practical nurses (RPNs) said they have considered leaving their nursing job after the pandemic because of working conditions and abusive behaviour directed at them by families of patients.
"Staffing levels in Canadian hospitals are being impacted too. Statistics Canada reported that job vacancies in the health care and social assistance sector reached an all-time high of 136,800 in the first quarter of 2022, rising nearly 91 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2020.... Staff shortages at hospitals, delayed patient care and increased wait times have led frustrated patients to vent at hospital staff, with some incidents even turning violent.... [S]ays Monica Dey, a charge nurse at Milton District Hospital[,] 'We spent three months being heroes. And now we get yelled at and cursed at because of the wait times'....
"Experts say that urgent measures need to be taken to alleviate the intense pressure on nurses and other health care workers. 'We just haven’t kept up with enough people [and] with enough training to deal with the kind of situations that are happening and so they burn out,' says Pat Armstrong, professor emeritus and distinguished research professor of sociology at York University in Toronto. '[Nurses] work through their lunches. They come in early, they stay late. They work double shifts,' Dr. Armstrong says. 'You can’t survive on doing that'....
"Dr. Armstrong and her research team did a survey of staffing in long-term care in Nordic countries and in Canada.... The survey showed that there were two big differences between the Nordic countries and Canada. One was the staffing levels, and the other was the degree of autonomy that the nurses had – the extent to which they could figure out how to do it themselves based on their skill as opposed to being told what to do.
"In Norway long-term care, for example, there are a high number of registered nurses on staff, notes Dr. Armstrong. These nurses are involved in direct care of the patient and there is a continuity of care and familiarity with the patient which is invaluable. When nurses have more control over their work, they perform better and are more satisfied with their jobs, she adds....
"'We see nurses, all the time, figure out how to do things, but they need the time to do that right – how to respond to an individual or how to share their knowledge, how to learn from each other. What we need is just a lot more respect for the skills that nurses have and give them the tools they need to exercise those skills.'"
Read more: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-nurses-moving-abroad/
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