Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. Thank you for the invitation to appear before this committee on behalf of Canada's nurses.
As was mentioned, my name is Linda Silas. I'm president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, and I'm a registered nurse by profession.
The CFNU is Canada's largest nursing organization, representing frontline nurses—the RNs, LPNs, RPNs, or psychiatric nurses, and nurse practitioners—as well as nursing students.
When you say “front line”, that's us. Just last week I met with nurses in Manitoba to hear their stories and listen to their solutions on how to stop nurses from leaving our system. They said, “Show us respect at all levels of nursing. We need standardized education. Remove obstacles placed in front of internationally educated nurses. Stop the proliferation of agency nurses, because it's killing us, especially those of us who commit to employers in our province. Increase and fund nursing education seats. Increase support staff, because we can't do it ourselves.”
Lastly, one said to me, “I've had enough of mandatory overtime. I know there's not enough staff, but overtime won't fix it. If they don't fix our unit, we will be closing, and where will my cancer patients go then?”
Nurses take their jobs very seriously. They care deeply about the well-being of their patients, and they have a duty to uphold professional standards in their work. Over 80% of nurses report insufficient staffing in their workplace. Two-thirds are saying the quality of care has declined over the past year, and severe burnout is up to 45% from 29% just prior to the pandemic. These factors are pushing many nurses to leave their jobs and the profession itself.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of vacancies in the health care and social assistance sectors has grown significantly, reaching over 118,000 as of the third quarter of 2021. Almost 34,000 of these job postings were for nurses, and many went unfilled for more than 90 days.
How do we prevent more nurses from leaving their jobs and attract enough nurses to address these ever-growing vacancies? We need a pan-Canadian health human resource plan that will equip the provinces and territories with the tools and resources they need to retain and recruit enough nurses and other health care workers to sustain our cherished public health care system.
From hiring guarantees for new graduates, as was done in Nova Scotia, to facilitating the transition from part-time to full-time positions, to providing opportunities to upgrade skills, to bridging programs or the New Brunswick “earn as you learn” program, these are the necessary initiatives. Let's recognize experienced nurses as mentors and provide accessible mental health programs for everyone.
For the sake of both our workforce and our patients, we simply cannot afford to lose any more of these critical frontline workers. This multi-faceted approach would allow the federal government to provide target funding to the provinces and territories so they can respond to the needs at the local level.
The CFNU is well placed to work with the federal, provincial and territorial governments around retention and recruitment initiatives. We have a track record that goes back two decades to when we were faced with a similar nursing shortage. We contributed to the final report of the Canadian Nursing Advisory Committee in 2002 and the nursing sector studies that followed. We produced integrated strategies for nursing resources in Canada, including the aboriginal workforce participation initiative, the AWPI. These are all federal government programs.
Following this, Health Canada approved a proposal by CFNU to implement 10 pilot projects in the provinces, as well as in Nunavut, to improve nurse retention and recruitment. One lesson we learned is that successful endeavour happens when the federal government works with unions, employers, governments, universities, colleges, and professional associations. We can accomplish a lot together.
In 2019, we spent over $175 billion on the health workforce. That's nearly 8% of the country's GDP. In spite of all this, we know very little about these workers. Along with 60 organizations in health care, the CFNU signed on to the call to action, urging the federal government to establish a national health workforce body to collect data, strategize and fund strategies.
Provinces and territories cannot manage the scale and complexity of this crisis on their own. It is long past time for the federal government to step in.
Once again, I thank you for providing me this opportunity to contribute to this important study, and I congratulate you for doing this important work for Canadians.
I would be happy to answer your questions. Thank you.