Tam and Hall: To fix the nursing shortage, start with a little respect

.

It goes without saying that highly trained and skilled nurses are critical to the function of the emergency department. Nurses are the members of the healthcare team with whom our patients interact the most throughout their stay. Recently, however, nursing shortage have been so severe that, in an unprecedented move, some or all of certain emergency services or urgent care centers have had to temporarily close throughout the country, both in rural and urban centers.

.

A critical shortage of nurses has been brewing for some time: expanding areas of responsibility without concomitant increases in pay, and a lack of clear and consistent requirements for career advancement are just some of the reasons why the nursing profession Nursing has failed to attract and retain a sufficient number of professionals. new recruits

Additionally, ER nurses are at disproportionate risk of workplace violence: more than 50 percent of nurses in Canadian emergency departments experience verbal or physical abuse in a given week, a proportion that has only been exacerbated by COVID-19.

The pressures of the pandemic have further highlighted these issues: our nursing staff are understandably Burnedpicking out best paid jobsOr simply leaving the profession total. The current situation in emergency departments across Canada is untenable for both our patients and our nurses, who are already working to the best of their physical reach and capabilities.

.

Despite this, vacation requests have been progressively denied, work hours are routinely extended, and the ratio of nursing staff to patient numbers has increased, so that each nurse is now expected to see more patients per shift than she is used to. Recently, A study in an American emergency department showed that for every additional patient above four that a nurse in an acute care department needs to care for, the greater the risk of poor patient outcomes, including length of stay and mortality.

It is time to recognize that our nursing colleagues deserve more respect and appreciation than they have been shown.

First, we must pay our nurses commensurate with their growing role as the backbone of our health care system. There is precedent for the way we have neglected to pay our nurses adequate wages or protections over the years: In 2016, nurses were initially excluded from the bill 163, which gave first responders such as firefighters and paramedics the ability to file claims with the WSIB for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite the proven high-risk nature of their work, nurses were only included in this legislation a year later, after significant public promotion.

.

In 2019, Bill 124 was passed to restrict wage increases for provincial employees, including nurses, to a maximum of one percent per year, without keeping pace with annual inflation and pre-existing or growing pressures to increase. exercise over members of the profession. Although significant promotion For nursing groups, there has been no commitment from the provincial government to repeal the bill. Any commitment to truly address our nursing shortage must start with adequate compensation for their work.

We also need to dismantle the prevailing perception of health care as a hierarchy. Instead, healthcare is decidedly a team profession, with our nurses overlapping the most with the entire team of allied health professionals to coordinate care for our patients. They are also often assigned additional tasks on top of those for which they are paid.

The public and political perception of nursing has not kept pace with the reality of the profession and the scope of what we ask our nurses to do. They must be consulted and valued as key stakeholders to ensure that our health care system can continue to function. This starts with giving them the respect and compensation they so richly deserve.

Vivian Tam is a family emergency physician in Ottawa. Follow her on @vtamster. meredith room is a registered nurse in Ottawa.