Remarks made by Robyne Maxwell of the Vancouver Island Health Authority in Tuesday’s Times Colonist present, I believe, a misleading picture of a nurse’s work environment under the new model of care delivery rolled out Friday at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital.
Nurses (registered nurses and licensed practical nurses) haven’t been “doing it all” and actually have been working in a team model for years. Care aides have been an integral part of the teams for a few years now. VIHA is only now officially putting it on paper.
Overtime has not been eliminated by this new model since being implemented at NRGH. Many nurses were brought in on the first day who were not scheduled. They were moved off other shifts (short-notice change, therefore paid at overtime) or brought in on a day off at overtime, or redeployed from other units. Nurses did this not wanting to abandon their colleagues on the first day. I’m not sure how long they will want to keep that up in such horrid work environments.
Stating nurses feel valued at this time is a joke. They are in tears at the end of their shifts daily since the implementation. They warned VIHA this would not be in the best interest of quality care and they have yet to be proven wrong.
This model doesn’t free up nurses as VIHA keeps stating. There are fewer nurses. The care aides (made official) did not go up in numbers, so are still working with fewer in most units.
Regarding job loss — there are many nurses that would argue the semantics of this statement. The fewer nurses on a given shift means that those jobs have disappeared, which would fall under the definition of loss, as far as I’m concerned. Nurses in some cases, had to go to part-time to be able to keep a job. Only 160 new graduate RNs were hired this year as opposed to the 270 from the year before.
And because vacation-relief lines were created to move nurses off the units, casuals will be working fewer hours. All a loss. Nurses had to change units to stay on full-time in some cases (forced to move).
The increase in care hours has yet to come to fruition. Nurses and the care aides are so busy that much care is falling to the families or getting missed. Removing the nurses from the bedside and stating that care aides will give more care hours means that patients will face more complications, such as infections, staying in hospital longer, more falls, failure to rescue (meaning that the patient gets sicker and it takes longer to get noticed), just to name a few.
Maxwell makes it sound as if nurses are averse to change when she says this is happening all over Canada. Nurses go through change all the time as there are changes to the health-care system or processes. This change is just plain bad for patients and that’s why nurses are pushing back.
The story VIHA tells makes it sound like a place that any health-care worker would love to work. The reality is nowhere near this. My heart breaks for the RNs, LPNs and the patients.
Jo Salken is Pacific Rim regional chairwoman of the B.C. Nurses’ Union.
