One of the biggest issues our healthcare system is facing right now is understaffing. It’s no secret, and it’s not a problem unique to the NWT. With stiff competition for workers across jurisdictions, healthcare workers are in a position where they can be choosy about where they live and work.
This means our territorial government needs to do better than the south in offering a more competitive package to prospective healthcare workers. Better wages that factor in cost of living and more flexibility with scheduling are two things our members in healthcare tell us would go a long way toward improving retention.
The GNWT has, over the past couple years, received influxes of healthcare dollars from the Federal government. How has NTHSSA senior management chosen to spend this money to solve the staffing crisis? Hire more agency workers. There are two very big problems with this approach.
The first big problem is that agencies are not bound by the collective agreement provisions that ensure all healthcare workers are treated equitably when it comes to wages, leaves, and working conditions. I am sure senior management sees this as a benefit: no HR management or accountability if you can outsource it!
When resident workers see job postings for agency workers offering better wages, higher bonuses, and cost of living allowances that far exceed their own compensation, it loudly contradicts the GNWT’s message that they value their own employees and are doing their best to recruit and retain resident workers.
So where does this leave resident workers? What we’re hearing from our members in the healthcare system is that morale is at an all time low and NTHSSA’s retention problem is about to get a whole lot worse. Resident workers that feel undervalued and unappreciated aren’t being shown otherwise. It doesn’t make them want to stay.
Our members are concerned about the increased workload for resident nurses who have to train and re-train agency nurses on a continual basis. This takes a nurse away from patient care.
They’re also concerned about culturally appropriate healthcare and continuity of care, which should concern all NWT residents. Agency nurses don’t build lasting relationships with patients or community members. It’s so important for healthcare providers to have knowledge and understanding of their communities.
Agency healthcare workers also don’t contribute to the NWT economy. They take their higher wages home with them where cost of living is lower and their dollar goes farther. They do not volunteer with community organizations or contribute to municipal taxes.
And despite our members raising all these concerns, the GNWT wants to be able to choose the “easy option” of agency nurses over meaningful recruitment and retention efforts.
This leads to our second big problem: the privatization of our healthcare system.
To be clear, the union will never say no to agency nurses if there is legitimately no other option to provide care.
But there are provinces down south that are working towards banning the use of nursing agencies due to how much they’re costing governments. Hospital authorities are regularly over-spending taxpayer dollars because there’s no limit on how much these for-profit agencies can charge.
You can find the GNWT’s contracts for agency nurses online, and they run into the millions of dollars per year. During the February session of the Assembly, the health minister said in the Ledge that there are only a handful of agency nurses employed at any given moment.
So where is this all that money going? How much of the money being allocated to “NWT Healthcare” is going into southern corporate profits? The Yukon Employees Union recently published a side-by-side comparison of how much it costs to pay an employee versus an agency.
According to their report, in 2024, the Yukon government will pay $34.60-$43.80 per hour for a unionized Licenced Practical Nurse (LPN) employed under their collective agreement. They will pay $50.00-$110.00 per hour for an LPN through an agency.
The GNWT has been very cagey about publicising its own numbers on agency nurses, and it’s easy to guess why – our government, who is constantly claiming to be cash poor, seems fine with NTHSSA pouring millions of public dollars into the pockets of southern corporations.
Not a good look for a government that tried to sell us on a “fiscally responsible” budget this spring.
This is how the privatization of healthcare starts: allowing working conditions to deteriorate to the point where staffing and service levels are so low that there is no other choice but to contract out the work.
As a public sector union, we’ve seen this pattern before across Canada and here in the NWT – governments purposely kneecapping sectors of the public service to publicly justify their privatization.
Our members are very worried that the territorial government is willing to go down this road, while not being open and transparent with regular MLAs or the public that this is their intention.
The UNW has been fighting for NWT healthcare for decades, but the GNWT is upping the ante. Our healthcare workers will continue to fight, regardless of their fatigue, and our other members will fight with them.
We hope that the public they serve is willing to stand with them and hold our government accountable for how it spends public money.