Doug Ford’s disastrous failure to address hospital staff shortage is giving nurses a crisis of consciousness
Coughs, sniffles and a sore throat. I am writing this from my room where I have been alone for the last 48 hours. The first two days of a 10-day isolation period. Overall, I feel like crap. But I am not gasping for air, I can still get up and walk and I'm not so fatigued that I can barely open my eyes as many COVID-19 patients have been. Thank God for my vaccines and booster.
As a health-care worker who has seen her share of COVID patients over the last two years, I am not surprised I finally contracted the virus. Like many of my colleagues, I have gone to work with the ominous knowledge that getting sick was no longer a question of if, but when. I have started my shifts filled with so much dread and exhaustion that it overwhelmed anything else. But you can get very familiar with your feelings when you're the only person to hang out with and my time alone has helped me realize I'm not just tired. I am angry.
I grit my teeth when I read about our premier's plan to add new beds, a gesture that is both useless and insulting to the people of this province. The hard truth is this: we never had any shortage of hospital beds. If we wanted to we could fill hospital cafeterias, put up temporary tents, fill the staff rooms with stretchers and have staff take breaks in storage closets if they must. The problem is not that we don't have the beds. The problem has always been that we've never had the staff to support them.
Can you care for patients in a temporary tent without nurses, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, porters and health-care aids? If you take a patient and put them in an unstaffed hospital bed, they might as well have stayed home. And so, we come to Doug Ford's real problem, the one he is trying so desperately to shirk. An incredible, insurmountable staffing shortage. And nowhere is this shortage more obvious than in the number of nurses at the bedside. Google the words nursing shortage" and the name of any region in Canada right now. The results are horrifying. Shortages have been reported as critical in Toronto, Waterloo-Wellington, London, Peel, Ottawa, Hamilton and basically any other region. This problem is very real and it is not going away.
If you don't know what a nursing shortage means, it means that if you go to the ER you will wait hours longer for care than you should, sometimes resulting in fatal outcomes. On floors where nurses-to-patient ratios are higher, the risk of permanent damage or death increases. Nurses know this is dangerous, they know it is wrong. And they are left grappling with feelings of shame and guilt, fully aware that they are providing care that is no longer sufficient or safe.
In a time of crisis, you would expect Premier Ford to be doing absolutely everything he can to retain nursing staff. And yet he continues to maintain Bill 124, which places a cap on nurses' wages at a time when they are frequently being asked to do twice the amount of work for the same pay. Ford knew we were already short on nurses. Nurses knew we were short on nurses. Having played hero for the last two years, many of us have looked for our government's support and found it wanting. And for those who stay, a nursing shortage leaves us feeling we are terrible nurses, terrible people. Because our government failed our health system, our health system has failed us and, as a result, we are failing you.
Grace Martin is a nurse in Ontario.