P.E.I. Nurses' Union says no need for nurse practitioners to have their own union

As their role in health care continues to grow, nurse practitioners across Canada are looking to Alberta, where nurse practitioners recently formed their own union — but on P.E.I., the nurses' union that represents them says it's doing its job. 

During a recent Health P.E.I. meeting, Island nurse practitioner Darci Leggatt said compensation for nurse practitioners is "underwhelming" and "patchy," adding that she hopes a new contract will better reflect their increasingly important role in looking after Islanders. Currently, nurse practitioners are represented by the P.E.I. Nurses' Union.

Nurse practitioners are registered nurses with extra training, which lets them order tests, prescribe medication, manage chronic diseases and make referrals to specialists.

"They find themselves underrepresented, their priorities ignored, and [with] insufficient clout to make any change to their working conditions," said Anne Summach, the first president of the first standalone nurse practitioner union in Canada, the Alberta Union of Nurse Practitioners, in a recent interview with CBC Radio: Island Morning's Mitch Cormier. 

Summach said nurse practitioners from other provinces have been reaching out to her group, asking how to begin the process of organizing. 

A nurses' union is the wrong place for nurse practitioners, the Alberta union said, because it focuses on the needs of registered nurses, who perform a very different role in health care than nurse practitioners do.   

"They have a unique set of skills, responsibilities, a unique scope of practice," says David Froelich, the executive director of the Alberta union's bargaining unit.

"Their priorities are just diluted, if not lost, in the overall nurses' union." 

P.E.I. has about 100 nurse practitioners and more than 1,400 nurses. In Alberta, there are 500 to 600 nurse practitioners and a union representing 30,000 nurses. 

The P.E.I. Nurses' Union says it believes it is doing a good job representing the Island's nurse practitioners as well as its nurses, and there's no need for a separate union. 

"On P.E.I. we have a very specific local, or section of our union, that is all nurse practitioners, for the very reason that we wanted to ensure that they all had the capacity to collaborate amongst each other," said P.E.I. Nurses' Union president Barbara Brookins.

She added there are nurse practitioners at all levels of the union, including some involved in the collective bargaining process: "They are very much in position to be able to voice their issues and their concerns to both the union and the employer." 

Brookins said nurse practitioners on P.E.I.  also have the backing power of the other 1,440 nurses in the union. 

Yet she acknowledges some P.E.I. nurse practitioners are frustrated because there is a lack of understanding of their value in the health-care system.