Thank you.
I'm a nurse and president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions. We represent nine nurses unions across the country, except Quebec. We have 135,000 nurses. As I always joke, we represent the working nurses of this country.
I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to present our views on employability before the committee. You did hear from health professionals on September 21, and I want to take this time to thank Mr. Allison for allowing nurses unions to present our views on this issue.
The issues we raise are not unfamiliar to you. We bring an added perspective to what you heard that day on employment relationships and working conditions. We want to specifically bring your attention to the need for an immediate increase in investment in retention and recruitment strategies. I'll stress the retention aspect, because if we cannot retain our current health care workforce we will not be able to recruit. We need a strong role for the federal government in coordinating and facilitating a partnership for change.
Why hear about us again today? On December 11, Statistics Canada came out with the first survey on the health of nurses. The data is no surprise to nurses or nurses unions, and I would add that it is no surprise to health care employers. You have received a summary, which was distributed to you this morning.
One in five female nurses has more than one job, which is double the proportion of other employed female Canadians. Fifty per cent of nurses reported needle-stick injuries. Three in ten nurses experience pain that is serious enough to prevent them for carrying out normal activities. Two-thirds said that fewer staff is the reason that patient care is deteriorating.
By way of background, nursing is the most important labour force in Canada, not only because of its size but because of the demand and the values placed on it. That is not to say that we are the solution to everything. But when you fix the nursing workforce, it will have a ripple effect on the whole health care workforce.
Forty per cent of Canadian nurses are eligible to retire in the next five years. In order to offset this retirement, we would have to enrol 41,000 new nurses. Today we have 12,000 nursing seats and we graduate about 8,000 nurses a year. So you can see there's a big change coming.
We work an equivalent of 10,000 full-time jobs just in overtime. That's 18 million hours of overtime a year. Sick time was 52% higher in 2005 compared to 1987. What happened was the deep cuts in the 1990s. We are not going to debate why the cuts were made; we had to balance our budgets across the country, and we did. But we cut the most in health care. We need to modernize the health information and infrastructure in our workplace. We have an increased acuity of patients, and we have failed to have a national plan to look at the future.
Since 1999, numerous studies have been undertaken to examine the worsened labour shortage in the health care sector. This research has established a relationship between healthy work environment, workforce retention, and patient safety. We now need innovation in the workplace to test, to evaluate, and to replicate effective retention strategies.
Unions and professional associations are working to establish partnerships with employers to develop workplace projects in every province. Such projects would provide the opportunity for nurses to upgrade their skills to meet the serious shortage of critical care nurses while remaining in the rural regions and to utilize the expertise of seasoned nurses to allow workplace mentoring on a train-the-trainer model.
We are seeking support for these micro-innovations to be supported by macro-resources such as the federal government. We need to include policy change and different staff training models, to be evaluated and then replicated across the country.
There is also a need to address the full-time work. Fifty-three per cent of our workforce work full-time. This is compared to 85% of teachers. Nurses are working part-time casual and of course supplementing their incomes with overtime.
The Canadian Nursing Advisory Committee in 2002 recommended that 70% of the workforce should be full-time. We're not there yet. Provinces like Saskatchewan, P.E.I., and Newfoundland and Labrador lose 30% of their new graduates to other provinces.
Federal partnerships are needed for other than Toronto or Ottawa. We need to be building links in health care between provinces and local workplaces. Real changes in health care will only happen with the commitment of local employers and employees, the vast majority or whom are nurses.
In summary, Canada needs leadership from the federal government to support micro-innovation in workplace change, and a pan-Canadian approach to health human resource planning that looks at needs, retention, and recruitment, and facilitates partnerships between employers, unions, government, and professional associations.
Merci.