North Bay hospital needs 300 workers to address staffing crisis, union says
Unless 300 people a year are hired, the staffing crisis at North Bay's hospital will only get worse, says the union representing hospital workers.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) said Tuesday that problems at the North Bay Regional Health Centre, including spiking emergency room wait times, will only get worse.
Speaking Tuesday outside the hospital, Dave Verch, an RPN and the first vice-president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, said wait times have increased by 47 per cent in the last year alone.
“We need the public to be aware of this issue and bring it forward to their MPPs,” Verch said.
“We need this government to take action and take action now."
CUPE said it calculated the need for 300 staff hires based on what it describes as “available government and hospital data.”
It said there are equal concerns that more than $1.6 billion in provincial COVID-19 money that helped hospitals deal with the additional will be eliminated in 2023.
There were more than 80 hospital ER and unit closures province-wide this summer.
“We have done more with less than every other province in this country and now we're seeing the exodus so high that it's absolutely a crisis situation," said Verch.
Overall, the union said 46,000 people must be hired just to deal with a nearly 15 per cent turnover rate. The union is calling on the province to maintain the extra funding and to scrap Bill 124, the provincial law that caps public sector wage increases at one per cent.
“The number of resignations would go down and hospitals would not have to recruit so many new staff to deal with the unprecedented turnover rates and increased needs of an aging and growing population,” Verch said.
In a statement to CTV News, the hospital acknowledged staffing pressures but said it has not had to close its emergency department or cancel services.
“We are feeling the strain,” said hospital spokesperson Kim McElroy.
“We currently have 164 vacancies and half of these are RNs or RPNs. We are working on some innovative recruitment solutions to continue to provide the best care to the people we serve.”
A request for comment from the Ministry of Health was not provided by publication time.
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