Thank you.
I want to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you from Treaty 6 land here in Edmonton, Alberta. I give thanks to the fore peoples taking care of the land prior to our arrival.
My name is Pauline Worsforld and I'm a registered nurse. I'm here today to speak on behalf of Canada's nurses.
I serve as secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, CFNU, which represents approximately 200,000 nurses and nursing students across the country. This is an elected position, and I've held it since 2001. I also work as a staff nurse in the post-anaesthetic recovery room at the University Hospital in Edmonton. In fact, I got off work this morning at seven o'clock, and I have been requested to work overtime, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. tonight, ahead of my next night shift.
As a registered nurse for 40 years, I can speak first-hand of the collateral effects of COVID-19 on our health care system and the people within it. I see my colleagues, fellow nurses and health care workers across the country, struggle to manage psychologically with crushing and unsafe workloads. While health care staffing shortages have existed for far too long in this sector, COVID-19 has brought an already overstretched workforce to its breaking point.
In 2019, the Ontario Nurses Association said that the province would have to hire over 20,000 nurses to reach the country's average staffing ratio. The nursing shortage is so bad in Ontario, and you've all seen the news, that the Ford government is pleading for nursing support from other jurisdictions. It breaks our hearts. We all want to help. The reality is that throughout the country we're all experiencing shortages.
It's time to sound the alarm, and these staffing shortages will have dire consequences for our nursing and broader health workforce beyond COVID-19.
The CFNU conducted a study before the pandemic, and we already knew nurses were suffering mentally, in part because of staffing shortages. One-third screened positive for major depressive disorders and suicidal ideation, and more than one-quarter screened positive for generalized anxiety disorder and clinical levels of burnout. One in two identified having a lack of staff to adequately cover their unit as the number one source of extreme stress in their job.
Burnout has worsened dramatically over the course of the pandemic with nurses being unable to take leaves and working ceaseless hours of overtime on virtually no rest. A StatCan survey of 18,000 health care workers found that 70% reported worsening mental health during the pandemic, and nurses are the hardest hit.
Without urgent and comprehensive action, we risk an exodus of frontline nurses and other health care workers when we emerge from the pandemic.
Our “Outlook on Nursing Survey”, which was nationwide, was conducted just before the pandemic. More than 66% of nurses rated their work environment as fair or poor, and 60% said they intended to leave their job within the next year, with one in four of these same nurses saying they intended to leave nursing altogether. In fact, I work with people who were on the cusp of retiring in one, two, or three years, but they're going in the next six to 12 months for sure. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them.
A recent survey of nurses in Ontario found that 13% of nurses in early career, aged 25 to 35, were considering leaving the profession permanently after the pandemic. According to a report from La Presse, 4,000 nurses have already left their positions in Quebec during the pandemic, which is a 43% increase over previous years.
How will be able to manage with a growing number of nurses leaving the profession when we have an enormous backlog of surgeries and procedures? How will we fill the ballooning vacancies of nurses and other health care workers, with over 100,000 vacancies in the health and social assistance sector at the end of 2020? How?
What is needed now more than ever is federal leadership to address critical nursing shortages across the country, through targeted transfer of funds to the provinces to immediately begin hiring more staff. To ensure a sustainable supply of nurses and other health care workers to meet growing demands, we need the federal government to help us address health workforce information gaps, which would enable adequate health human resources planning.
The federal government could address this through establishing a health workforce agency reflecting international leading practices, and in particular, in Australia. This could fill the data gaps that limit our ability to retain and recruit the workers required, giving us the tools we need to manage the frightening shortages and vacancies we are currently experiencing.
We have the opportunity to ensure nurses and other health care workers have the supports they need going forward, but we have to act, and we have to act fast, for the sake of our nurses and the health and safety of our patients, residents and clients.