Health workers call for plan in federal budget to handle crisis in healthcare

The federal government is set to table a budget against the backdrop of several national and international emergencies and major funding commitments.

The federal government is set to table a budget Thursday against the backdrop of several national and international emergencies and major funding commitments.

Chief on that list is addressing Canada’s flagging health-care systems, which are stressed to the brink by two years of the pandemic and likely to continue to struggle under the weight of massive surgical backlogs.

While many of the problems the government looks to solve require multibillion-dollar solutions, groups representing burnt-out health workers say their top ask is a relatively cheap one: they want a plan.

“This human health resource crisis is really becoming extreme and it’s dramatically impacting our ability to care for people ,” said Dr. Katharine Smart, president of the Canadian Medical Association.

Doctors, nurses and other health workers have reduced their hours and left the industry in droves, their professional associations say, but there is no national plan to figure out exactly how many have been lost or how to replace them.

Several groups, including CMA, have banded together to ask the federal government to move forward on a human resources strategy, or even agency, that would count, track, train and retain health professionals to keep Canada’s systems afloat.

“It doesn’t make sense that in 2022, we don’t know how many personal care workers we have in this country. We don’t know how many nurses are going to retire,” said Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions.

Health professionals have been asking the federal government for a data-based plan for a decade now, Silas said.