The union that represents nurses employed in the provincial healthcare system says that the Thompson General Hospital emergency department is severely understaffed and that the lack of available nurses is increasing wait times for patients with nowhere else to go for treatment.
Darlene Jackson, president of the Manitoba Nurses Union, says that she met with Thompson ER nurses during a recent visit to the city for Manitoba Federation of Labour meetings and was told that only about half of the department’s nursing positions are filled.
“They’re doing an incredible amount of overtime just to keep the department staffed,” Jackson said. At times, there are not enough nurses to provide relief coverage for regularly scheduled breaks and even finding the time to go to the bathroom can be a challenge.”They are exhausted. They’re working so much overtime to try to keep that place glued together.”
A Northern Regional Health Authority spokesperson says that staffing shortages are resulting in “extra” treatment spaces — stretchers and chairs in the emergency department hallway, which supplemented the ER’s seven treatment and two trauma beds — being closed.
“Staffing levels have been unstable for some time due to the current shortage of healthcare professionals provincially and nationally and also due to the two-plus year pandemic we have just gone through.”
There are also stresses outside the healthcare system that are impacting patient care, specifically a lack of accommodations in Thompson for patients from outlying communities who are fit to be discharged, which results in some people being sent to the Thompson homeless shelter until they can travel back to their home communities.
“The staff concern in this is they want their patients to go somewhere safe,” said Jackson, noting that just because you don’t need to be admitted to hospital doesn’t mean that you won’t require followup care. “They don’t want to send people out on the street without a place to go.”
Staff do try to make accommodations arrangements for discharged patients from outside of Thompson, which receives eight to 15 medevac patients per day, but sometimes there aren’t hotel rooms or other suitable accommodations available.
“Communication occurs between the TGH emergency department staff and the homeless shelter to ensure a safe discharge for those individuals,” the health region spokesperson says.
Jackson says staffing shortages have a cascading effect through the healthcare system. For examples, when the Thompson walk-in clinic was closed for two weeks due to insufficient staff, many people with non-emergency medical concerns had nowhere to turn but the ER.
“At the end of the day, the patients still keep coming, there’s nowhere to divert them to,” she said. When that happens, and when extra treatment spaces in the ER aren’t available, wait times for non-emergency patients can extend as long as 12 hours, which results in frustrations that are often taken out on nurses.
“We’re also seeing some situations where nurses are being verbally abused,” Jackson said.
At times. over the summer, there haven’t been enough security staff to have a security guard on duty, the NRHA says.
Although the provincial government touts the fact that it has increased the number of nursing education seats in the province, that needed solution is years away from delivering relief. Jackson says frontline nurses have ideas that could help alleviate the strain on themselves, other health care providers and the patients they serve.
“These nurses have solutions,” she said. “They’re not a huge cost. They’re not something that’s unattainable. They certainly would help manage the situation right now. But I’m not sure that anyone from the regional health authority … has met with them to talk about that.”
