An untenable system that is too big to fail:
Every year, nurses, nurse practitioners and politiciansgather for conversation over coffee and breakfast. This year’s “Breakfast with Politicians” was different.
“Morale is at an all-time low,” said Tracy Saldivia-Oda, a communications representative for the Ottawa region of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario.
“It’s at the height of tension, and we’re in very serious disagreements. Hundreds of nurses in the Ottawa area were just laid off,” she said.
The tension she’s referring to is, in part, between registered nurses and the Ontario government, which continues to change funding for hospitals, resulting in workforce cuts.
In April, The Ottawa Hospital announced it would cut about 400 workers. Most of them would be nurses.
“If anyone says there are lots of nursing jobs in Ottawa — there are not,” Saldivia-Oda said.
Without good staffing ratios, says the Ontario Nurses’ Association, Canada’s largest nurse union, there will be even longer wait times, possibly life-threatening delays and unreasonable workloads. While staffing ratios vary and are often not achieved in practice, the 2024 Patient‑to‑Nurse Ratios for Hospitals Act says a 1-to-1 staff-to-patient ratio is ideal within critical care, for example.
At Friday morning’s event at Oat Couture cafe on Gladstone Avenue, ONA representatives handed out flyers to local health-care workers and their supporters outlining the consequences of the recent cuts.
The hot topics of the morning also included the reduction of Ontario Student Assistance Program funding, low wages for nurses working in community health care as opposed to hospitals, changes to the Canada Health Act, difficulties in navigating the health-care system and violence towards nurses in hospitals.
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