Unions representing nearly 70,000 hospital workers in Ontario are renewing their calls for the province to address staffing shortages that contributed to recent emergency room closures, raise wages and boost hiring. Suggesting measures like giving financial incentives to give
The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions and SEIU Healthcare have sent a letter to Premier Doug Ford calling on the province to take a number of actions to reduce the labor shortage in health care.
These include repeal of Bill 124, a provincial law introduced in 2019 that limits wage increases in public sector contracts to one percent a year.
Those provisions were set to remain in effect for three years, and Ford recently said it would take inflation into account during upcoming contract negotiations.
The unions have also issued an open letter to the Ontario Hospital Association, asking it to take a number of steps to fill vacancies as well as improve transparency in relation to the current crisis.
Neither the provincial government nor the OHA immediately responded to a request for comment.
Some hospitals in Ontario warned earlier this month that emergency department closures this summer could be a recurring issue, especially for smaller communities.
Communities such as Perth, Clinton, Listowel and Wingham have recently seen ERs closed for hours or even days.
The OHA had earlier pointed to staff shortages and capacity issues, saying these were causing backlogs in the hospital system. It said rural and northern Ontario were particularly affected.
Organizations representing doctors and nurses have repeatedly said that workers are burned, resulting in many people leaving their jobs.
Those sentiments were echoed by unions and two nurses at a news conference on Thursday.
“We’re breaking down, the whole system is breaking down,” said Justin Champagne, a frontline nurse and SEIU Healthcare member at a Toronto area hospital.
Champagne said nurses usually care for four to five patients at a time, but now that number has gone down to seven.
She said it is also “not rare” to call nurses back to work because they are going home from eight to 12-hour shifts.
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