As a provincial election looms, Alberta's two major political parties are revealing plans to address the province's health-care worker shortage, and local nurses say the changes are needed to help solve staffing shortages.
Orissa Shima, president of the United Nurses Union local 85 at the Sturgeon Hospital in St. Albert, said the staffing shortage is “very real” and stressed the importance of retaining existing staff, as well as recruiting additional staff.
“Any attempt to recruit is a good thing … I think there's definitely a need in terms of positions that's well-documented across the province. And certainly, (there have been some) challenges with physician coverage,” Shima said.
The local hospital is staffed so the baseline level is a bare minimum, as a result of operational best practices leading up to the pandemic, Shima said.
“We just are staffed to the bare minimum,” Shima said. She noted that the staffing shortage is so severe that when staff call in sick, or have time away they are entitled to, it becomes incredibly difficult to fill their absence.
“Recruitment takes time. It's not a quick and easy fix. But you can do things to retain the people we have in the system and to support them better right now.”
Shima said she believes the inability to retain staff is due to “chronic underfunding of the system,” noting that cuts to universities effect the number of nurses coming into the system as well.
“Ensuring appropriate staffing and booking on workload when units are heavy, or when flows in [the ER] are heavy, goes a long way in helping to ease the moral distress that the nurses are feeling when they can't provide the care that they're trained to provide. Because they are taking on extra workload, extra patients,” Shima said.
Competing healthcare plans
On Feb. 15, the NDP announced a strategy to connect one million Albertans with a family doctor as part of its “commitment to rebuild and strengthen family health care in Alberta.”
The NDP aims to alleviate the long lines in hospitals across the province by connecting people to their family doctors within 24 to 48 hours. The plan calls for a transition fund to hire 1,500 non-physician employees into existing clinics, as well as opening 10 family health clinics across the province. Non-physician employees would include access to nurse practitioners, mental health therapists, pharmacists, social workers, dietitians, community paramedics, physiotherapists, and many more specialists.
The following day, the UCP government announced its Health Workforce Strategy, including funding of $158 million in the upcoming provincial budget to attract more doctors and other health care professionals to fill gaps in care.
“Demands on the workforce will also continue to grow as the population ages. This strategy builds on the great work already underway and sets the stage for a resilient work environment in the province that supports its workers in providing the highest quality health care,” Health Minister Jason Copping said in a news release.
The budget is to be delivered today, and Copping said the $158 million will be split, with $90 million going toward strengthening programs to attract and retain rural physicians, and $29 million to fulfill the government’s commitment in the agreement signed with the Alberta Medical Association that specifically focuses on underserved rural and remote communities.
Some $7 million will be set for targeted recruitment of internationally trained nurses from the United States and the United Kingdom, and $1 million will be set to fund the provincial Nurse Navigator program which support all nurses immigrating to Alberta.
Opposition NDP health critic David Shepherd said the UCP are only trying to clean up the mess they made by tearing up the master agreement with doctors three years ago and seeking to cut nurses’ wages during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s no wonder that health-care professionals have fled Alberta,” Shepherd said in a statement. “The results of the UCP chaos are clear — dozens of rural hospitals partially closed, urban emergency rooms overwhelmed, ambulances delayed longer and longer, and a vast number of Albertans without any access to a family doctor.”
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, approximately 15 per cent of Albertans do not have a primary health provider.
The provincial government will be providing more details as the budget is announced in the coming weeks.
