In the following article Minister Dix discusses recent emergency room closures at rural hospitals and emergency centres. Within his addressment he makes a very problematic statement...
"The staffing shortages are largely caused by health care staff calling in sick", Dix said, with between 15,000 and 17,000 people off in a given week out of the approximately 126,000 public sector health workers.
Are there increasing sick calls? Yes there are, because the staffing ratios we are operating under are incredibly unsafe for patients and staff. The moral distress, physical and emotional labour, and rate of burnout is high.
On my own floor (where we are only supposed to have 3-4 post-operative patients as our population is one of high acuity, including epidurals, ketamine drips, cardiac monitoring, chest tubes, extensive wound dressings and burn care, artificial airway management, and much more) we are often working with 5-6 patients these days. This is not at all safe. Many medical floors have 7+ patients to manage.
12 hours is a long time to be on your feet trying to keep people alive, in a job where helping lift 100 pounds is considered light, you likely won't get breaks, and you'll likely stay overtime to just get charting done... It's a lot to ask, so even if it was just sick calls that were leading to staffing shortages, it's because the state of healthcare is absolutely unmanageable.
Yesterday I worked 13.5 hours (only got one partial break) and ended up with 5-6 patients, everyone lived and we carried through because of an amazing team of people who go above and beyond in this work, but operating in crisis management is not sustainable.
We are burning out the nurses we have and turning away the nurses we are training. Nursing school is incredibly expensive, I roughly calculated a cost for my 4 year degree with books and tuition at $60,000. This doesn't include rent, food, utilities, life, etc. Nursing school is one of the few healthcare education programs where students pay to work. In our final practicum we are paying about $3000 (it may have gone up) to essentially do the work of a nurse...
LPNS, working at the edge of their scope on most days (and often pushed to go beyond) make incredibly little pay in comparison to their skills.
But the staffing and healthcare crisis goes far beyond sick calls and burnout...
For one thing, an extreme lack of primary care increases the burden on secondary and tertiary care. If we better support people upstream, we would not only save lives and quality of life, we would save money. This ungainly crisis management system is non-functional, but that is hard to see unless you are on the floor, at the bedside, talking to staff and patients. Not in a suit, in a pair of scrubs, doing the work we do.
For Minister Dix to simplify a much more complicated situation to essentially something staff are doing, fails to address the multitude of other issues in our floundering system (nor does he explore why staff are calling in sick when that does happen.)
In these desperate times, private companies are pushing us ever closer to a two-tiered system, with clinicians having to turn to private employment options in the rising costs of the every day and the fee-for-service model BC has for physicians.
For my patients and for my colleagues and for every nurse across this province, I will continue to ask for this government to do better. Public healthcare is something I wholeheartedly believe in and will continue to fight for change. Not only because it is desperately needed, but because I believe we are capable.
How can you help? Write to your MLA, to Dix, to Horgan, and to Trudeau himself.
- S.
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