Overtime boycott will hit St. John's hospitals hard, documents suggest
A plan by the Newfoundland and Labrador Nurses' Union to boycott overtime will undoubtedly cause trouble at St. John's hospitals, which each log hundreds of hours of overtime every week during the spring, documents obtained by CBC News show.
Data collected through provincial access to information legislation shows that Eastern Health — which manages hospitals and nursing homes on the Avalon, Bonavista and Burin peninsulas, and areas in between — depends on nurses to accept overtime assignments to keep many units operating.
More than 5,000 members of the Nurses' Union will stop accepting overtime next Wednesday, as a dispute with the Newfoundland and Labrador government moves into a new stage of confrontation.
Premier Danny Williams said Wednesday such a move, which the nurses are calling an overtime strike, will put patient health at risk.
Data obtained from Eastern Health shows that the largest hospitals in the province spend heavily on nursing overtime.
For instance, the Health Sciences Centre, which provides tertiary care services for the entire province, logged 5,984 in nursing overtime hours in May 2008 alone.
At the adjacent Janeway children's hospital, nurses were paid 2,326 hours of overtime in the same month. Across St. John's, at St. Clare's Mercy Hospital, the overtime count was 3,022 hours.
Across all of Eastern Health's facilities in May 2008, the authority paid nurses for 18,309 hours of overtime.
Across April and July of last year, the nursing overtime bill for Eastern Health was 62,584 hours, or the equivalent of about 5,215 shifts. For the same period in 2007, the authority logged 73,118 hours.
Eastern Health said Thursday it planned later in the day to lay out its contingency plans for coping with an overtime boycott.
Overtime has been a key issue for the Nurses' Union, which has been locked for months in a conflict with the Newfoundland and Labrador government. Last weekend, the union announced that 63 per cent of its participating members voted against a final government offer, which would have raised wages and salary scales, but which controversially would force the union to accept two terms that its negotiators find completely unacceptable.
In the first, the government and its health authorities would have the ability to pay a new nurse a higher wage than peers doing the same duties, if the job is classified as hard to fill. In the second, an injured nurse would lose his or her job two years after being deemed permanently disabled.