The New Brunswick Nurses Union is sounding the alarm over a reliance of casual staffing in the province’s long term care homes.
Union President Paula Doucet says problems continue to worsen, and there are risks in maintaining a nursing home with the majority who are casual employees.
“Taking that, there may be familiar staff coming in day after day and shift after shift, they become like family working in long term care. When you look at the number of casual positions that are available and being offered, quite often the casual staff don’t stay, so there’s a higher turnover rate.”
Doucet says the data they uncovered found the government is looking at recruiting more Registered Nurses in casual positions than for permanent ones.
She says the COVID-19 pandemic has meant a lot of seniors in isolation, which means the only connection they have is to staff.
But they need consistency, and casual workers can’t provide that.
“COVID-19 has really put a spotlight on long term care and I really hope that with all of the discussion that has been taking place, that government and employers are really serious. It takes a village to raise a child, it takes a province to take care of our seniors and we need to do this,” Doucet says.
The Union says, through right-to-information requests, they were able to obtain a 2019 New Brunswick Association of Nursing Homes hiring forecast which shows a lack of progress on this issue over time.
Doucet says, according to the forecast, New Brunswick nursing homes were expecting to fill 170 of their 224 open positions with casual non-guaranteed labour.
She adds, within the 51 RN positions that were expected to become open in 2019, nursing homes anticipated making only 9 permanent offers to applicants – a total of 18% – leaving the other 82% of postings to be filled through casual hours.
Doucet says, “When you rely more heavily on casual staff versus permanent staff, I don’t think that is the right matrix. The governments needs to put more money and more funding into the nursing home so that they can better and better equipment their staff for those residents.”
