Yukon Health Minister Feels Pressure On Rural Nurses

Friday, 13 October 2017 08:47

Pauline Frost admits additional nurses in some health centres were not hired for the summer tourist season.

Health and Social Services Minister Pauline Frost (Vuntut Gwich’in) says her department was unable to recruit adequate nursing staff for the health centres in Destruction Bay and Beaver Creek for this summer’s very busy tourism season. She says a decision was made to assign relief or auxiliary nurses to support the current staff.

Frost says they advertised for the positions, but no one was hired. “Yes, we went out and we advertised for the jobs. We attended recruitment fairs across the country, we've advertised so the tendering has gone out.” “The position didn't get filled. We took alternative measures to ensure that the nurses had the weekends off. We brought in auxiliary nurses, we brought in on-call nurses. We ensured that the measures were put in place to provide support to the communities.”

The New Democrats tabled a petition from the Yukon Employees Union, Thursday, claiming to have more than 500 signatures asking “the Yukon Legislative Assembly to urge the Government of Yukon to fully staff all the Yukon’s Community Health Centres, in order that no nurses are required to work alone.” Kate White (Takhini-Kopper-King) says having understaffed rural health centers could lead to safety issues. “Leaving nursing stations understaffed and nurses overworked leaves communities and nurses at risk and vulnerable. We know that a letter of agreement was signed with the nurses’ union to address this issue. We hear that attempts were made to hire new nurses, or at the very least, find temporary relief with floating nurses. These are all half-measures and do nothing to reassure these health care professionals who just want to do their work and receive the support they need to be able to care for themselves as well.”

YEU President Steve Geick echoed White’s concerns. “Some study suggests that after certain periods of being awake and working a certain length of time is the same as being intoxicated driving a vehicle. Your senses are dulled. You are dealing with somebody’s life. Let's say it's a cardiac arrest, you are the one administering the drugs and doing everything. It's not just something you read off a script and do, there's calculations for drugs that need to be done. And if you've worked 24 hours straight, or have been up all night--people make mistakes, and it's no fault of their own.”

Frost told the Legislature that recruiting of nurses was difficult. “We’ve gone through a continuous basis to recruit for the vacant positions. The challenges we find ourselves in are most definitely not unique to one community. As a government, we are taking a strategic approach to ensure that community nurses are successfully hired.” “We can note that we’ve hired successfully and trained 21 nurses in the last year to fill a variety of part-time positions and auxiliary-on-call positions to support the communities that the member opposite mentions.”

Geick says the government’s hiring strategy is wrong. He says instead of going to Canadian major cities on a recruitment drive only to come back empty handed, the government should focus on nurses with northern rural experience. “You do a targeted job fair. It's been done here in the Yukon back in the early 2000's. Recruiters came to town from Alaska, looking for remote nurses. We lost a lot of nurses to Alaska at that time. They [Yukon Government] refuse to do that. Go to a natural home where people work in northern communities, take people who can make decisions in hiring nurses and get it done.”

Frost says the government will look to alternatives for rural nursing support. “We can’t control the recruitment process. It’s very difficult to find nurses — it’s difficult to do the recruitment — but we are looking at ensuring that we provide backup measures and backup plans when necessary.”

(Dan Jones Whitehorse Oct. 12, 2017)