Alberta’s Health and Wellness Minister Ron Liepert tried to blame nurses’ overtime for health budget deficits in media interviews recently.
"One of the largest cost factors is paying overtime, double time, and triple time to nurses," Liepert told the Calgary Sun.
He said the government has a “horrible” contract with nurses and the province needs “a contract that better serves the members of the nursing profession and better serves the taxpayers.”
UNA responded by pointing out that it is the nursing shortage, not nurses, that cause overtime costs and the government created the shortage by laying off 5,000 nurses 15 years ago, and cutting the nursing schools.
Liepert said the problem is caused by many nurses only working part-time and told the Sun that only 23% of nurses in the former Calgary health region work full-time.
“We need to make some changes there, because you’re always going to have shortages if three-quarters of your employees only work part-time,” he said.
“Mr. Liepert has a very simplistic interpretation of the workforce here in the province when it comes to nursing,” UNA Heather Smith responded.
“We’ve worked really hard with Alberta Health Services to try to bring in recruitment and retention initiatives. Mr. Liepert, with these very irresponsible comments, has set us back in our efforts to keep new graduates in this province and to keep nurses working.”
Heather Smith pointed out there are nurses who want to move to full-time and others who want to reduce their hours.
“If we need to move to changing the mix of full-time and part-time, we should be doing it with carrots, not sticks,” Heather Smith said.
“As soon as you start talking about beating up on nurses and beating up on our collective agreements, layoffs, rollbacks, you create a chill. Young men and women coming out of nursing schools are going to be saying: is this the 1990s all over again? Am I going to take a job today and find out next week I’m out the door?” Heather Smith said.
Smith says the health system needs to address the working environment that’s been created after years of cuts and understaffing, and the age of the nursing workforce. We can’t expect nurses nearing retirement to work as many hours a week as younger nurses.
“Unless Mr. Liepert has amazing powers I’m not aware of, he can’t wave a wand and make everybody in nursing ten years younger,” she said.
Shortage of full-time nursing jobs
There are many nurses who would like to increase their hours or go to full-time, but often only part-time jobs are available. Recently health employers spent millions of dollars to recruit internationally educated nurses to the province, but then offered many of them only part-time jobs when they got here. Right now there are several international nurses who were recruited into temporary positions and are actively looking for permanent jobs. They are unable to find full-time or even FTE of .8 or greater.
Overtime nursing could be better than no nursing
Recently political commentors on CBC Radio pointed out that having nurses work overtime is likely better than the alternative, nurses NOT working overtime.
University of Lethbridge political scientist, Peter McCormick said if you think having nurses work a lot of overtime is a problem, what do you think things would be like if they weren't.
He said if the government complains too much about paying overtime rates for extra hours, they better watch out. What if the nurses said, ok we won't work overtime.
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