Manitoba Nurses Union files grievance against Shared Health over safety concerns

The Manitoba Nurses Union says something has to be done about violent attacks on staff at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre.

The union has filed a grievance against Shared Health, the organization that oversees health-care delivery in the province, citing safety concerns for its members.

MNU president Darlene Jackson says the union has "bringing this issue to the employer's attention for a very long time."

Nurses regularly have their vehicles broken into in the staff parkade, and in the past week there have been two violent attacks against staff inside Health Sciences, she said.

"That area [around HSC] has one of the highest rates of violent crime in this city … and after dealing with it for months and months and months, and nurses bringing it to their attention, we felt we had no choice," she said.

"Our nurses deserve a safe place to work and they deserve an area getting back and forth to work … where they don't feel as if they're going to be assaulted."

Nurses often have to go around people injecting drugs in the parkade stairwell and people who are intoxicated, Jackson said.

"I talked to one nurse who went out and realized somebody broke into her vehicle and there was a used condom on the back seat," she said.

"So there are individuals in the parkade that may pose a risk to staff going in and out, and there's absolutely nothing [that's] been done about it."

The majority of incidents take place at HSC, but there are safety concerns at other health-care facilities in the province, Jackson said.

"It's time the employers out there dealt with what's happening in their facilities."

In 2018, HSC staff were given miniature personal alarms that emit a loud screaming sound when triggered.

They were encouraged to carry them while working with patients and walking to their vehicles after work.

In 2019, the province said it planned to give hospital security guards the power to detain violent individuals, in response to the rise of violence at health-care facilities. The guards would be reclassified as institutional safety officers, with other duties to be determined through consultation.

The legislation came into force in October 2021, but there's been no change, Jackson said.

"There's not an institutional safety officer in any health-care facility in this province," she said.

Without those reclassifications, which would offer proper training and equip officers with handcuffs and weapons, the security staff in health facilities are basically paid witnesses, Jackson said.

"They can't intervene at all and they don't have any powers to retain and restrain," she said.

"Do we need institutional safety officers in every facility in this province? Probably not. But we certainly need enhanced security in all of our facilities, and there are definitely facilities where we need ISOs, there's no two ways about it."

'Listening to health-care workers': minister

The province's new health minister says they "want to make very clear that our government takes this matter very seriously."

"I've already met with system leaders to get a better understanding of what steps we can take. I've been listening to health-care workers who have shared their concerns about their issues," said Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, who uses they/them pronouns.

Asagwara said they met with leaders in-person and virtually on Thursday, in an effort to hear from as many people as possible.

Addressing the issue requires allowing health-care workers to share their experiences, "and also bring their ideas in terms of solutions forward," they said.

Institutional safety officers also have to be part of an overall approach to improving safety and security for health-care workers, said Asagwara.

In a statement to CBC News, a Shared Health spokesperson said the organization, which oversees health-care delivery in Manitoba, is working through a few final details around the institutional safety officer positions, with the goal of posting positions in the next four to six weeks.

Training is expected to take up to six weeks to complete once the hiring is done, the spokesperson said. 

Shared Health can't speak directly to the details of the grievance, but a number of precautions have been put in place, the spokesperson said.

Those include a focus on evicting people who are in the parkade for no legitimate reason, increased patrols, additional lighting, enhanced video monitoring and ensuring interior stairwells in staff parkades are locked to the public. The initiatives have brought close to an 80 per cent decrease in reported parkade incidents when comparing May to September, the statement said.