An acute nursing shortage is clogging or even closing hospital emergency rooms (ERs) across Canada, pushing an already stressed national health system to the brink with potentially severe consequences for patient care.
Burnout from the COVID-19 pandemic, abuse from patients and salary discontent have seen nursing staff quitting their jobs in droves, and experts say the situation is only likely to worsen.
The impact on emergency care is such that Ottawa police recently had to take a shooting victim to hospital in their squad car, rather than wait for an ambulance, and an elderly woman who fell and broke her hip was forced to wait six hours for help from paramedics based 100km away.
Photo: AFP
Over the summer and into the fall, staffing shortages meant dozens of emergency rooms were forced to close — sometimes for a night or a weekend, sometimes longer.
Wait times to see an ER doctor have soared to 12, 16, 20 hours — or more.
“They’re numb, deflated and feeling hopeless,” Ontario Nurses’ Association president Cathryn Hoy said.
Herself a nurse for 20 years, she described the situation as “critical.”
Amelie Inard, 32, was taken to an ER in Montreal this week, in extreme pain and peeing blood.
The place was packed, and an overwrought nurse told her to describe her condition “in one sentence, really quickly, because of how busy they were,” Inard said.
She eventually left in frustration, without seeing a doctor.
Hospital workloads are rising, Hoy said, along with patients’ exasperation over extended wait times, leading to a spiking of violence against nurses.
Several nurses told reporters that they had been punched, scratched or spat on, and had trays, dishes and feces thrown at them.
In the capital, Ottawa, ambulances were unavailable on more than 1,000 occasions from January to July, as paramedics were stuck waiting to unload patients at crowded ERs.
A hospital in Peterborough, east of Toronto, in the past week was forced to treat patients on gurneys in the parking lot because its ER was full, Hoy said.
In Manitoba, doctor Merril Pauls said there had been “multiple times throughout the summer when we had to shut down beds in the emergency room” at Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre because of the nursing shortage.
On one recent Sunday, “we had too many people coming in and had no place to put them. We literally were double-bunking critical patients in a resuscitation bay,” he said.
It is a “really significant phenomenon going on across the country,” he added.
A recent survey by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the country’s largest labor union, found that 87 percent of nurses have considered leaving their job “because of the thankless and grueling working conditions.”
“Even new graduates are quitting,” Hoy said.
Canadian Minister of Health Jean-Yves Duclos has vowed to make it easier for foreign credentials to be recognized. That could help 11,000 internationally trained doctors and nurses get jobs in their field in Canada.
However, that would not be nearly enough, with 34,400 nursing positions vacant, according to government data.
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