Sask. Health Authority, nurses’ union at odds over ‘new’ health-care positions

As Saskatchewan continues to face a shortage of health-care workers in the province, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) is announcing more staff and long-term care capacity is coming to Saskatoon.

The announcement, according to a news release shared on Tuesday, said 285 permanent and 81 temporary staff will be added in the city for health-care positions in community and hospital settings.

This progress, the release said, is being made in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. Recruitment is reportedly already underway, with postings about the positions listed last week.

However, the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) and the SHA are in disagreement over what the announcement actually means.

John Ash, the vice-president of Integrated Health Services for Saskatoon, called the positions “net new.”

“All the positions identified are new positions,” Ash said, explaining that they did not include existing staff being recycled from temporary into full-time positions, with the exception of a “small number” of intensive-care positions.

Ash identified those ICU positions as requiring significant training and said some existing, temporary staff would be transitioning into permanent positions to cover expanding bed capacity.

“We want to kind of prime up, knowing that we’re going to be getting additional dollars to hire those staff,” Ash said.

However, SUN president Tracy Zambory says nurses are no better off than they were before this announcement was made.

Zambory said she has been asking questions and “from what we can figure out,” the positions are “recycled,” likely by turning temporary positions into permanent ones. The SUN president said this is according to members working in Saskatoon who “know what’s going on” in the city.

“It is very misleading to the public for them to sort of make it seem that this is new when in fact it’s not,” Zambory said.

An ambitious timeline of 90 days has been set to fill those positions, though Ash acknowledged the current human resources environment might make this difficult. He said should the positions not be filled within that time, efforts to fill the positions as soon as possible will be made.

Ash said the announcement looks to increase the number of beds available for patients in Saskatoon while also expanding staff capacity with the new positions.

The union president called the situation one of smoke and mirrors.

Zambory said Saskatchewan has been staring down a storage of almost 1,000 full-time equivalent registered nurses in the system since before COVID-19 first ravaged the province. With myriad positions still needing to be filled, Zambory expressed disbelief that the province will be able to fill 285 positions in the next three months.

Even if the positions were new, however, Zambory said nothing would change because they would not be filled in 90 days, with the countrywide shortage — and therefore competition — to obtain the same health-care workers, and because the province is in need of so many more employees than what this announcement allocated.

“It is the lack of transparency, it is an illusion that is being created … for the public to think that everything’s OK,” said Zambory, adding the announcement has created “distress.”

“We’re not really digging down into the issue, we’re not really speaking with registered nurses to figure out how it is we can solve this problem,” she said.

Zambory also pointed to factors driving nurses already in the province away from the profession: Pressure, burnout, turnover and unsafe nurse-to-patient ratios that are leading to nurses vacating positions by reverting to casual work, leaving for an agency or leaving the profession altogether.

“It is the fact that we are not retaining the registered nurses that we need to because the workplace is in constant chaos,” Zambory said.

She pointed to the lack of dialogue with registered nurses to ask them how the province can work to keep them in Saskatchewan.

Ash said a phased approach will be used as positions are filled due to the large number of positions.

“We want to make sure that we’re being thoughtful about onboarding them and prioritizing them to get them into areas of focus first,” he said, noting attention will have to be paid to where staff come from to ensure unintended impacts are not made on other areas in the system.

Offers have already been made to numerous graduating nursing students at various institutions, Ash shared, and said recruitment is ongoing outside of the province and in the Philippines. Meanwhile, incentives are already set up for other nursing positions in the province and Ash said the SHA continues to work with its partners in government around the health human resources plan in order to support province-wide recruitment.

“Retention is very important for us so we obviously want to create an environment for staff to stay and are happy with the work environment that they’re in,” Ash said. In relation to this, he noted that the added positions will help with the burden nurses in Saskatchewan are currently carrying and cut back on overtime hours.

In one instance, by hiring permanent staff, Ash explained, a number of nurses in a staffing pool who are currently overseeing 43 new beds in Royal University Hospital will be able to return to their original areas of operation.

Ash said the SHA’s work on the longer-term actions within the Saskatoon Capacity Pressure Action Plan is continuing and updates on progress to address the capacity pressures impacting centres throughout the city will continue.