B.C. nurses are worried locked-in limits on transfer payments for health care to the provinces announced in Thursday's federal budget will cost the province as much as $300 million per year, and they say it will leave hospitals unable to pay enough nurses to meet the demand.
The BC Nurses' Union said there will be a reduction in overall health care budgets starting in 2014 because Canadian Health Transfer payments will be limited to six per cent annual increases and a new population-based funding formula will further penalize B.C. because it has a high percentage of senior citizens.
"We are desperately short of nurses -- we need somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 of them in the next five years, and the squeeze the feds put on the provinces puts the squeeze on the health authorities, who then can't build to capacity to meet patent care needs," said Debra McPherson, the BCNU president.
"We'll continue having to rack and stack patients in hallways and have seniors at home falling through the cracks because we can't provide them with the necessary home support or get them into a longterm care facility. This is the federal government walking away from its responsibility for medicare."
McPherson said after the province endured a severe shortage of nurses in the 1990s, the government increased capacity for training programs and B.C. now graduates about 1,000 nurses every year. But not all of them are finding jobs.
"The challenge is the employers are not funded to create jobs for them," said McPherson. "We have nurses who are unemployed or underemployed at a time when nurses in the hospital are short, and that's why our whole bargaining campaign this year is focused on getting more nursing jobs created so we can relieve the workload of the nurses.
"At a time they are graduating these people, they can only get casual employment. And for difficult-to-recruit-to areas like the North, people aren't going to move there for casual employment."
The BCNU, through its safecarenow.ca website, is gathering names for its protest to try and convince the B.C. government to fight the pending reductions in health transfer payments.
McPherson said B.C. and its aging demographics, with more seniors than most provinces, is going to require significant increases in health spending, and nursing care is part of that.
"The highest amount we spend on health care is in the last six months of life," she said. "If we're not going to subject seniors to the most expensive care, which is acute care, then we need to be providing a lot more home support and better chronic disease management so we can keep people healthy in their homes."
The Northern Health website on Saturday listed 74 positions available to nurses, of which most were for part-time, casual or relief full-time employment. There is a shortage of full-time entry-level jobs for nurses and many new graduates have to take part-time positions to start their careers. Positions are going unfilled for highly-skilled nurses, nurse practitioners, managers and nursing faculty instructors.
Martha MacLeod, professor and chair of UNBC's school of nursing, said the nursing profession follows a cycle in which there are either too many nurses looking for work or not enough available to meet the demand, which makes it difficult for health authorities to plan human resource management. Nurses all want full-time positions, while the hospitals want the flexibility to hire enough casual and part-time nurses to meet the need, but also keep labour costs down.
"It's extremely tough to get that balance," said MacLeod.
Four out of every five nurses who graduate nursing programs at the College of New Caledonia and UNBC stay to work in northern B.C., which has traditionally been a difficult region to attract nurses. There were 468 nursing students involved in the UNBC program in 2010-11.
"Over the course of a year, Northern Health has about the right number of positions for graduates, but they won't be all available at one time and they certainly won't all be full-time positions, so if they can get a full-time position somewhere else, they might leave," MacLeod said.
"Getting that balance right is terribly difficult for Northern Health in a short-money situation, and that's going to be even worse as time goes on."
