Nurses from across northern B.C. took to the streets in Prince George on Friday afternoon to protest changes made to staffing levels on Vancouver Island.
Members of the B.C. Nurses Union are concerned that a plan to replace some nurses with care aides in facilities in Nanaimo and Victoria will eventually spread to other parts of the province.
Union lobby co-ordinator for the northeast region Hanna Embree said patient care will be at risk in the name of attempted cost savings if nurses in acute care facilities are replaced by care aides.
"These care aides are an integral part of healthcare, in the appropriate place: long-term care, stable patients who like to see the same person everyday and who are in a good routine," Embree said. "It's not the appropriate place for one of these unlicensed care professionals to be at the bedside of an acutely ill patient."
The plan being implemented on Vancouver Island would see care aides take a more front-line role in health delivery, which would result in nurses being responsible for more patients at any given time.
As part of their training, Embree said nurses have between two and half and four years of training - substantially more than the one year of education for a care aide. Unlike nurses, aides aren't overseen by an independent professional body like doctors and nurses.
"All levels of nurses in B.C. have a college of nurses which sets out specifically what we are and aren't allowed to do," Embree said. "When you put an unregulated health professional at the bedside it becomes quite unclear as to what they are and aren't allowed to do."
According to Embree, 26 nurses in Nanaimo and another 122 nurses in Victoria have been displaced and replaced by care aides. She believes Vancouver Island is a testing ground and that other regions of the province will also begin to replace higher-paid nurses with lower-paid aides.
"If it's happening down there, it will eventually make its way up here," she said.
Northern Health spokesman Jonathon Dyck said the health authority has no plans to substitute nurses for care aides in this region.
"Any kind of changes to roles are responsibilities are done in partnership with our physicians, nurses and any of our other staff, at this time we're not planning any type of those changes," he said.
Many of the approximately two dozen demonstrators on Friday were clad in red and black to show solidarity to the colour scheme chosen by the nurses on Vancouver Island to bring more attention to their plight. They came to Prince George from across the northeast region, which stretches from Quesnel to Vanderhoof to Fort Nelson.
Embree said in addition to calling on health authorities to reject the practice of using care aides in acute care settings, they are also asking the province to hire more nurses.
