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Workplace Challenges

Health care is front and centre

We're in the middle of National Nursing Week and in light of the recent federal budget and in announcements from Queen's Park, health care is front and centre.

DAVID CHILTON

[ 2006-05-10 ]

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The Tories in Ottawa and the provincial Liberals are pleased with their efforts, but nurses and nursing associations are rather less enthused.

HEALTH FORCE ONTARIO

Health Minister George Smitherman announced details last week of a program called Health Force Ontario in which the province will look to aggressively recruit health-care professionals from around the world.

Doris Grinspun, executive director of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, says Health Force Ontario and other announcements from Queen's Park have not convinced her that the McGuinty government will live up to its promises of 7,000 new nursing jobs and 70% of all nurses working in full-time positions.

"We are not encouraged by the rate of progress (towards those goals)," Grinspun says. It takes up to six months for a new nurse to find any kind of work, she continues, and up to two years for her to find full-time work.

As for Health Force Ontario, which will see the province set up a job portal for professionals from abroad, including nurses, Grinspun is unimpressed. She calls the move "unethical" and says, "It's the U.S. strategy of a quick fix." There's a worldwide shortage of nurses, Grinspun says, with vacancies soon to be in the one-million range.

Local solutions to the problem are what's needed, she says, noting the attraction of the 80-20 solution. That means a nurse 55 or older works in patient care 80% of her time and spends the other 20% mentoring new nurses or working on special projects.

Also part of Health Force Ontario will be a one-stop centre for internationally trained professionals in Canada to get information on how to resume their professional lives, and what Chris Bentley, provincial Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, says will be new and expanded training programs for current health care providers.

In addition, the Liberals will create four new roles for occupations in high demand: physician assistant, nurse endoscopist, surgical first assistant and clinical specialist radiation therapist.

As for the federal budget, Lucille Auffrey, CEO of the Canadian Nurses Association, says although there are some positives for health care, such as new money for affordable housing, an investment to help prepare for pandemics such as SARS and avian flu, and greater spending on the Canadian Strategy for Cancer Control, there's no funding to deal with the health care guarantee -- announced in the 2004 Ten Year Plan to Strengthen Health Care.

Despite the disappointment of the budget and reservations about the provincial initiatives, the outlook isn't entirely bleak. Auffrey says National Nursing Week, May 8 to 14, is an international event to recognize and celebrate nurses' contribution to health care.

Each year there's a theme to National Nursing Week, Auffrey explains. This year it's "Health Choices for Healthy Living." As an example, Auffrey points to diabetes, noting not just its financial cost but the damage, such as kidney failure, that it inflicts on sufferers. "Yet 80% of diabetics' problems could be prevented if we were to approach them from a different perspective," Auffrey says.

Although the theme of National Nursing Week in Canada is national, activities to acknowledge the role more than 230,000 nurses play in the lives of Canadians are organized locally by individual departments, individual hospitals or hospital networks such as Toronto's University Health Network. The second week in May was chosen as National Nursing Week to coincide with the May 12 birthday of Florence Nightingale, the 19th-century British nurse who did so much to modernize the nursing profession.

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