Swan Valley hospital ER struggling to fill nursing shifts after agency changes: union
CBC
The union that represents Manitoba nurses says the emergency department at the hospital in Swan River is running with half the nurses required, with some shifts having no nurses at all.
It’s a problem the provincial government should have seen coming as it moves away from relying on nurses from private agencies, the president of the Manitoba Nurses Union says.
"We're hearing from nurses in Swan River a lot about the crisis with staffing," Darlene Jackson said Friday.
"We do know that the ER has a 50 per cent vacancy rate at this point, and they've consistently had vacancies in that ER, and have been very heavily reliant on agency nurses to keep that area staffed."
In an email to CBC, Prairie Mountain Health — the western Manitoba regional health authority that includes Swan River — confirmed a 50 per cent nurse vacancy in the emergency department at the hospital in Swan River, a town about 380 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.
A spokesperson said procedures have not been reduced in Swan River's operating room, nor were any chemotherapy appointments cancelled because of staff shortages.
The health authority added it is encouraging agency nurses to consider working for the region.
Jackson says the issue is a lack of planning on the NDP government’s part to prepare for an exodus of agency nurses, which is one of the reasons why many health-care facilities are short-staffed.
Manitoba announced earlier this month that it will only work with four private agencies to fill vacant shifts at public health-care facilities, a change that came into effect on Thursday. That's a sharp decline from the nearly 80 companies the health-care system was contracting, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said in a recent interview.
Four companies — Elite Intellicare Staffing, Integra Health, Bayshore HealthCare and Augury Healthcare — won the right to work in Manitoba through a competitive bidding process, according to Shared Health, which co-ordinates health-care delivery in the province.
The province has said the hope is that nurses who were working for private agencies will take jobs with the remaining agencies or in the public system. But Jackson said the union fears the disruption will leave already poorly staffed rural centres with even fewer nurses.
"We've been to government on numerous occasions," she said. "Every time we were assured by the minister of health that yes, resources would be in place … and here we are."
The provincial Progressive Conservatives also say staffing issues are a predictable outcome of the nursing agency changes.
"It didn't have to be this way," said Roblin MLA Kathleen Cook, the Opposition party’s health critic. "The NDP were warned by front-line workers, by people like me, that this approach was not going to work everywhere."
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