CALEB NICKERSON
SHAWVILLE Feb. 7, 2020
On Friday, the Centre intégré de santé et des services sociaux de l’Outaouais (CISSSO) announced a week-long break in obstetrics services at the Pontiac Community Hospital (PCH), lasting . . .
from 4 p.m. on Feb. 7 to 8 a.m. on Feb. 14. The reason for the break was a lack of nursing staff.
This is the 12th interruption to the service since September 2019, and is one of the longest, following the three-week break that occurred over the Christmas holidays.
An employee at PCH familiar with the situation, who spoke to THE EQUITY under the condition of anonymity, said that the obstetrics unit is staffed with about half of the 12 nurses required to run optimally. Between holidays and other nurses turning down overtime due to exhaustion, the source said they were unable to staff a full 24 hours for the week.
“We could cover days but not nights, or nights but not days,” they said.
The source said that two recently licensed nurses have joined the department, after having their obstetrics training expedited in Gatineau. The source said this places a large burden of responsibility on these employees as well as their more experienced counterparts.
“They’re usually trained on the floor and orientated on the floor to get independence, get some experience you know, and then they’re trained in obstetrics,” the source explained. “But [it had to be done] backwards because we were pushed to do it.”
“They’re terrified and I don’t blame them, it’s a specialty,” they said. “You know, you can’t train somebody within even a month. The more you see, the more you do. Our volume isn’t very big, we don’t do that many deliveries in a year, so to get used to it and get the experience as a new nurse, it can take a while.”
The source added that while the situation in the obstetrics department has gotten a lot of attention, the rest of the floor is having similar difficulties finding and retaining experienced staff.
“It’s all new, new nurses. We don’t even have any senior staff on the floor to look over, or pair them with,” they said. “Our quota, we’re supposed to have three RNs and three LPNs … and a lot of the time, there’s only one RN and five [LPNs], we don’t even have enough RNs on the floor.”
The source expressed frustration with the lack of applications for the eight full-time RN job postings that had been put out recently. They noted that an upcoming change in the union rules means that in the near future nurses from facilities in the city will be able to apply for jobs at PCH without losing their seniority. The source was sceptical that this would make a significant difference in the staffing situation, but was hopeful that PCH would get more applicants in their next round of job postings.
