Nurses leaving health care as pandemic continues, says Sudbury nurse

Nurses in Greater Sudbury and across the province are having to work short-staffed with no immediate end in sight, according to the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO).

Maria Casas is a registered nurse and manager in long-term care based in Sudbury. She's also the association's policy and political action executive network officer in the region.

She said she has seen nurses in her workplace leave the profession altogether due to burnout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Nurses who are retirement age, who otherwise probably would have stayed on because they loved nursing have decided they just don't have the energy anymore to do that," she said.

Casas said surveys in Ontario have shown the province is at risk of losing 20 per cent of new nurses, who are in their mid-20s to mid-30s.

"This isn't the career they thought they signed up for," she said.

Casas said the profession has been understaffed for a long time, but the situation is at the worst point she has seen during her 30 years in nursing. 

She said one issue she has seen in long-term care has been staff having to take time off of work so they could stay home with their children, who were in contact with potential COVID-19 cases.

Casas said the RNAO has requested a few changes that could help address the nursing shortage.

One would be for the province to reinstate a program called the Late Career Nurse Initiative, which supported employers so they could move late career nurses into less physically demanding roles. Casas said the initiative allowed many late career nurses to take on mentorship roles, where they could support the newer generation of nurses.

The association has also asked the province to repeal Bill 124, which limits the salary gains nurses and other public sector workers can achieve through collective bargaining.

"So the Ontario government, on the one hand, was calling nurses the heroes of the pandemic and on the other hand, was saying they didn't deserve to participate in bargaining and get the increases that they deserved," Casas said. "So it felt like a slap in the face."

Casas said nursing programs across the province also need more spots available to help address the shortage.

"The government has committed to adding more spots in the schools, but only for the coming year," she said. "That needs to happen in the next several years and keep increasing in order to catch up to where we need to be."

Funding for nursing programs

In a written statement, Ontario Ministry of Health spokesperson Anna Miller said the province has invested $35 million to increase spaces for college and university nursing programs in the next academic year.

"The new spaces will introduce approximately 1,130 new practical nurses and 870 registered nurses into the health care system," Miller said.

Miller added the government made a commitment in its fall economic statement to recruit more than 5,000 registered nurses and registered practical nurses by 2025-26.

The province added Bill 124 will still allow for Ontario's public sector workers to receive salary increases for seniority, performance, or increased qualifications as they do currently.

"We are proud that Ontario's temporary pandemic pay was the most generous in Canada – for an average employee working a standard 40-hour work week, this represented an additional $3,560 on top of existing wages over a 16-week period," said Treasury Board Secretariat Communications Branch spokesperson Greg Simpson in an email.

Vicki McKenna, the president of the Ontario Nurses' Association (ONA), said the vacancy rate for registered nurses in Ontario hospitals has surpassed 20 per cent. 

"Nurses who are in the workforce now are contemplating or are leaving," McKenna said. "We have thousands of nurses eligible to retire right now."

McKenna said anxiety is high among Ontario nurses, but added there have been some positive changes since the pandemic started. She said proper personal protective equipment, for example, is now readily available for all health-care workers.