A year later, pledge remains unfulfilled

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/09/2022 (774 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A YEAR ago in September, the Manitoba Nurses Union (MNU) distributed a pledge to the two candidates vying to become leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba – and therefore premier. The pledge was focused on repairing the broken relationship between the Manitoba government and nurses across the province.

This pledge contained several important commitments:

· To acknowledge that Manitoba is experiencing a critical nursing shortage;

· To work with the leadership of the MNU to address this critical nursing shortage;

· To improve working conditions for nurses across Manitoba;

· To provide information in a timely, open and transparent manner to the MNU;

· To be more open and honest with the MNU and the public about the situation nursing is in, including providing staffing statistics and data for all health regions in the province;

· To improve nurse recruitment potential by making Manitoba a more attractive jurisdiction in which to practice nursing;

· To do everything possible, as premier of Manitoba, to repair the relationship between this provincial government and nurses, and to allocate the resources needed to stabilize the nursing situation in Manitoba;

· To ensure timely collective bargaining so Manitoba can retain the nurses currently practicing here, and address their long-standing concerns and stagnant compensation, which has remained unchanged since October 2016.

A year later, the nurse staffing situation is a worsening crisis, and little progress on these issues has been made by the government of Heather Stefanson, who signed our pledge and was later chosen as the new leader of the PC Party. Frankly, the future of health care in this province is looking bleaker than ever.

While a new collective agreement was successfully negotiated and ratified in October 2021, the rest of the above commitments remain unfulfilled.

The Stefanson government continues to blame the COVID-19 pandemic for the severe staff shortages that we are witnessing — shortages that are being pointed to as the reason for health-care facility closures, especially in rural areas, and for the difficulties we are seeing in hospital emergency rooms.

However, we know the truth.

The truth is that while the nurse staffing shortage was exacerbated by the pandemic, it was not caused by the pandemic.

Nurses’ unions such as MNU have been warning governments about the coming staff shortage for decades. Many nurses were already leaving the profession before COVID-19, spurred by worsening working conditions, heavy workloads, mandated overtime and an increased psychological burden.

Successive governments at both the provincial and federal levels have been underfunding health care, while at the same time claiming the opposite. Governments across this country are now haunted by bad decisions made before the pandemic. These include the Pallister government’s bungled and irresponsible health system restructuring efforts, as well as the decision to reduce funding to Red River College, which led to the slashing of 75 seats in its Bachelor of Nursing program.

This was done with the full knowledge and support of those holding cabinet positions in the Pallister government – including our current premier.

These moves were made despite MNU leadership warning the government about the looming staff shortage. At that time, there were already an insufficient number of nursing students graduating to cover the number of nurses who were retiring or leaving. All of this happened before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current staffing situation is dire: there simply aren’t enough nurses coming into the system to meet the demands, and we are seeing the consequences of this in reporting by our local media. As of the end of July, there were 1,550 vacant nursing positions in the WRHA and Shared Health alone.

As long as the working conditions nurses face remain unaddressed, one can only expect vacancies to increase further.

We need our government to make it a top priority to improve working conditions so we can ensure the nurses we still have in our health care system and those who are newly graduated stay in our health care system.

Darlene Jackson is a registered nurse and president of the Manitoba Nurses Union.