Manitoba nurses quitting amidst mandated overtime, high vacancy rates, no home-life balance
CBC
Some Manitoba nurses are leaving the health care field saying they are burned out and unable to maintain any work-life balance due to high vacancy rates and mandated overtime hours, which the nurses union says is skyrocketing.
According to the Manitoba Nurses Union, nurses logged more than one million hours of overtime across the province last year and many continue to be mandated to stay well past their shifts.
It was enough to make Malyssa Wiens quit last year.
"I was often just angry when I was at work 'cause I just felt sort of at my wit's end," Wiens said.
Wiens was a part-time nurse for 10 years but quit last May because she felt she was no longer able to sustain her schedule.
"I was often being mandated when I would work a weekend so that meant that I would be working my regular shift and then I would stay and work a double shift," she said.
The 35-year-old said that meant she was often working 16 hours straight, multiple days in a row.
"I was very sleep-deprived by that point. I would say my brain was not functioning as its optimum," she said. "That had happened like eight or nine weeks in a row," she said. That's what finally pushed me to say, 'OK I can't do this anymore.'
Wiens had always intended to work part-time so she was able to be home more often while raising her children. But recently, her job had taken over and she was being mandated to work longer hours and she was unable to see her kids.
"So I had to finally choose. Do I want to be an exhausted and angry mom working as a nurse, or do I just want to be like a good mom to my kids," she said. "So that's what I finally chose."
It's a move more and more nurses have said they are considering.
The Manitoba Nurses' Union said mandated overtime was up in almost every health region last year.
According to data provided by MNU, in Winnipeg alone, nurses worked nearly 650,000 hours of overtime.
One nurse, who CBC is not naming for fear of job reprisal, said the work conditions keep getting worse and she doesn't know how much longer she can maintain it.