Nurses at long-term care homes will receive $10K bonus, Holt says

New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt has clarified who will receive upcoming bonus payments for nurses.

About 10,000 of the approximately 11,000 nurses working in the province are due to receive the $10,000 payments in December or January.

Those excluded from the retention initiative include some who are represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees and are in the middle of a dispute over pension changes, some whose job status is casual and some who work for special care homes.

Some licenced practical nurses, or LPNs, who work in non-unionized nursing homes thought they were excluded as well, but during an interview on Information Morning Fredericton on Friday, Holt said that's not the case.

"LPNs in long-term care are included in this bonus program," she said.

"It applies to unionized and non-unionized LPNs in the publicly funded system or through employers that are publicly funded like the Pine Groves and the Shannexes of the world."

Holt said some nurses had been misinformed because of communication problems on the part of the government.

"We'll take responsibility for the confusion created between the communications we had with the unions and that the unions put out to their members, and the communications from the government to LPNs working in long-term care in places that didn't have any New Brunswick Nurses Union or New Brunswick Union or CUPE representation," she said.

Mychelle Green says she was one of the licensed practical nurses who thought they were excluded.

Green wrote an email to the CBC, saying she works at a Shannex facility and would not get the money.

"It just felt like another sort of let down from the government," said Green, in an interview with CBC.

Holt apologized to Green and others who got the wrong message.

"I'm happy to tell her that she and her colleagues are included in this program," she said.

Nursing homes, such as those operated by Shannex, are often considered to be separate from the publicly funded health-care system, said the premier, but they are publicly funded and subject to mirroring agreements.