Editorial

May 8 2024

More nurses – a prescription to help revive ailing healthcare system

Changing lives. Shaping tomorrow.

That’s the theme for National Nursing Week 2024, which runs from May 6-12, one that recognizes the integral role that the healthcare professionals play in impacting Canadians’ quality of life.

Continuing to make that type of effect – for years now – has been plagued by a variety of issues, ones that, more broadly, cripple the system and compromise patient care.

Dealing with these challenges – such as recruitment and retention – has seemingly been a pressing challenge for many years; both provincial officials and representatives from the profession searching for solutions, while often at loggerheads on the appropriate answers.

An overarching challenge on a laundry list of ones put forward – including everything from financial compensation to working conditions – is the number of nurses practicing in the province. Those in the profession, and their leaders, have consistently made the call for an increase in the workforce.

More nurses will help relieve a stress that has a vice grip on the healthcare system, one exerting pressure akin to the feeling one gets as the blood pressure cuff tightens around their arm.

At the organization’s annual general meeting in Truro on Monday (May 6), Nova Scotia Nurses Union (NSNU) President Janet Hazelton said there is reason for optimism after years of anxiety about burnout, working hours – shifts of 16 hours and as many as 24 commonplace – and an unending battle for breaks and vacation; optimism found in the provisions of a new contract the province’s more than 10,000 nurses signed last July.

That deal, which Hazelton called “historic” at the time, included higher salaries, bonuses, capped shifts and measures to address staffing shortages.

And, just as importantly for Hazelton and other leaders, the collective agreement includes a stipulation that provides nurses with the power to set nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals.

With that in mind, this also raises the question of where the nurses will come from to fill those gaps. Officials at that AGM noted that there are more than 1,000 nurses from other parts of the country are waiting for licensing, while the work continues to modernize the accreditation process for international professionals.

The Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions – amongst other organizations in the field – are crediting Nova Scotia for being the second province (B.C.) to secure ratios.

The nursing shortage across the country, including in our province, is a crucial topic of discussion; one unfolding not only this week during the celebration of the profession, but also as the tireless effort continues to find the prescription to help treat an ailing system.

The lack of nurses is an issue that tops the list of concerns for Canadians from coast to coast to coast, when it comes to healthcare; one bolstered by national survey findings touched on in this week’s edition (The Conversation) on this page.

As that piece indicates, Statistics Canada reported in 2021-22 that nursing had higher job vacancies than any other occupation, while nurses worked more than 26 million hours of overtime. And, if nothing changes, the future looks bleak with forecasts predicting the nursing shortage to almost double to more than 117,000 by 2030.

The ability for nurses in the province to have a say in those aforementioned ratios will be a vital step in brightening the future for a profession ripe with dissatisfaction – an attitude reflected in a survey of 5,595 members by the Canadian Federation of Nursing Unions (CFNU) that showed 30 per cent were dissatisfied with their careers, while 40 per cent intend to leave the profession or retire. The respondents pinpointed increased workload and insufficient staffing as key contributors to that unhappiness.

In a CFNU study – Safe hours save lives – nursing shortages not only mean gaps in patient care, they also influence the health of nurses themselves. It is difficult for them to contribute to making people healthy, when they are unhealthy.

Increasing the number of nurses in provincial hospitals is a dose of common sense that our provincial healthcare system needs. It may be only one measure, but it is a crucial one to helping treat a suffering patient.

Let’s celebrate nurses and, hopefully, by next year even more of them.