Last week the local health authority announced that they would be forcing part-time health care staff at hospitals in the city to work full-time hours. In addition to a mandatory increase in hours, staff could be forced to work in a different facility or department than they’re used to.
Here in the Pontiac, while there isn’t forced labour at the moment, staff have been given . . .
financial incentives to work longer hours, the dangling carrot as opposed to the stick being used on their urban counterparts. While rural areas like ours have been left relatively unscathed by this pandemic, it’s not far-fetched to imagine that our facilities would be under the same orders if we had a surge in cases.
How disgraceful is it that health care workers need to be press-ganged in order for CISSSO to meet its staffing needs in the midst of the second wave of COVID? Nurses and support workers were already in short supply when this thing began, so it’s not surprising that the health authority is playing catch up.
Enacting such a drastic measure is likely to ease some pressure on certain departments in the short-term, by bolstering the numbers on the ward and allowing CISSSO’s managers to adapt more easily to staffing shortages across the network.
However, in the long-term, it is likely to cause staff to leave the system, and
who could blame them? Why work for an organization that treats people’s decision to work certain shifts or part-time hours as an insignificant preference? They are required to do important, life-saving tasks, but they also have lives outside of work. Some are single parents, some have young children, how can you force them to turn their lives upside down because they work for a dysfunctional organization? These workers have options, and one of them is to tell CISSSO to shove it and go work in Ontario or for a private company.
Those that try to tough it out risk burnout and a host of other negative side-effects. Having staff transferred between buildings and into departments they’re unfamiliar with is a risky play in the best of times, but during a pandemic it’s mind-boggling.
While we know staffing is an issue across the province, Outaouais health care is also underfunded compared to the rest of Quebec. Money isn’t going to solve the labour issue on its own, but it sure would help.
As easy as it would be to blame the CAQ Minister for the Outaouais, Mathieu Lacombe, or his colleague, former Health Minister Danielle McCann, they inherited a bit of a dumpster fire. The hospitals in Gatineau have consistently rated poorly compared to the rest of the country. Last year a report by La Presse found that the Outaouais had the highest rate of death by medical error in Quebec.
Throw on top of that a massive restructuring under former Liberal Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, and you can see why the system was in crisis mode before a global pandemic was even on the horizon.
The can has been kicked down the road for some time, but now more than ever we need to push for better health care funding for our region.
It’s literally life and death we’re dealing with here.
Caleb Nickerson
