Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting the Canadian Nurses Association to appear here today.
We applaud the committee's decision to conduct this important and timely study on Canada's health workforce, and we hope the work of members of this committee can help lead to meaningful and much-needed action.
My name is Michael Villeneuve. I'm the chief executive officer of CNA, and I am speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Algonquin and Anishinabe people in eastern Ontario.
I'm pleased to be joined by Dr. Gail Tomblin Murphy, from Nova Scotia Health. Gail is an expert in the science of health human resources and is chair of the Royal Society of Canada's working group on the impact of COVID-19 on the nursing workforce.
Mr. Chair, I first stepped into health care as an orderly in 1978. During my 44-year career, I have never seen anything like what the nursing profession is going through now. Canada's nearly 450,000 nurses are the backbone of our health systems, but they're completely exhausted and demoralized, and we're seeing many of them leaving their jobs and even leaving the profession. Ninety-four per cent of nurses say they're experiencing symptoms of burnout. Severe burnout among all health care workers has nearly doubled. There are close to 120,000 vacancies in the health care and social assistance sectors, and we've seen alarming rates of nursing vacancies in hospitals across Canada.
These issues are not new, but they've been exacerbated by the pandemic. Nurses have been sounding the alarm for decades on these very same problems, long before COVID-19. There have been studies, reports and literally millions and millions of dollars in research all pointing to some of the very same core problems and many of the same solutions. In modelling work done by Dr. Tomblin Murphy in 2009, CNA predicted Canada would be short 60,000 nurses by 2022, and here we are with the crisis we're living in now.
We know many of the solutions needed to stabilize the workforce. Canada needs a strong, modern, pan-Canadian health human resources strategy. Additional targeted federal funding is needed to help health care systems retain, recruit and provide for adequate levels of staffing.
The federal government has an important leadership role to play in ensuring Canada's health system is sustainable. It needs to work collaboratively with the provinces and territories on both short- and long-term strategies.
In the short term, we need retention incentives for nurses and health care workers to stay on their jobs. This could include retention bonuses, loan forgiveness, tax incentives. Additional funding to the provinces and territories should also be provided to help optimize workloads for health care workers. This could include increasing admin staff, for example, in nursing settings to unlock more time for care.
In the longer term, CNA endorses calls for a national health workforce body that would be responsible for collecting high-quality [Technical difficulty—Editor] to support workforce planning at regional levels. CNA also recommends increasing training and education for health care workers by enhancing the number of seats in schools of nursing and increasing capacity for clinical placements for nurses. Finally, we strongly recommend the development of a national mental health strategy for health care workers, which would include funding for mental health supports.
I'll conclude, Mr. Chair, by saying that in an emergency room one of the first things you do is stop the bleeding, and that's what Canada's health workforce needs right now. We need emergency and definitive interventions with immediate action, and then a multifaceted strategy to address the complex problems of Canada's health workforce.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Dr. Tomblin Murphy and I will try to answer any questions.