Thank you for your question. It's also a great question to close our nursing week.
I have experience in working in northern and remote communities. The last one I was in was in northern Ontario during the wildfires last summer. One of the many reasons why I had to leave was working conditions. We ended up being two nurses working 24-7, being on call and really just rotating between the two of us for a week. Our rotations were for a month at a time. While we were down south, we needed to self-isolate for two weeks at a time because of the pandemic before going back.
My community was facing a shortage too. We only have one nurse for our whole community, and she was on medical leave. They approached me and asked me to cover being the only RN for my community. I gladly accepted, but that's just one of the examples of why we have such a shortage of nurses. We're kind of sent everywhere, and by having the training in primary care, we're a rare commodity as well. My training with Indigenous Services Canada was a great asset for my community too.
The working conditions are terrible. They were terrible before the pandemic, but things have gotten worse. I see lots of nurses going through the onboarding program through Indigenous Services Canada. They last two to six months and then leave. I heard that one year in northern Ontario half of their onboarded staff left within the first year of their employment. That's a lot of costs.
I feel that if we just would invest more funding in the working conditions and the work satisfaction for nurses, we would avoid having some of those breaks in services. We've seen some communities without nurses sometimes, and that is tragic for me. I don't see how that is still happening in 2022.