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Originally Posted by edslunch
I agree it's not as easy as 'just fix it', there are a million things to improve, but surely they can be improved. Fast-tracking the certification of foreign nurses was a good move. I hate to say it, but contracting out selected treatments might be part of the solution, concerns about cherry-picking and poaching staff notwithstanding, but again if there are people and spaces available to do these surgeries why wasn't the public sector able to gear up to do them?
On the topic of nurse certification, I wonder what the economics of that are. My understanding is that overtime is a significant drain on the system, particularly when severely short of staff on an on-going basis. I've often thought the government could save money or at least break even by hiring more nurses, which it now appears they can. I'm curious if there's a break-even point where there can be more nurses for the same overall cost.
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Alberta has the most vacant family residency spots in Canada, and the most for Alberta in over a decade. There are medical students who are literally taking a year off instead of starting their residency here. There's a reason for that. Our government is constantly fighting with HCWs.
Fixing this stuff really isn't as complicated as we make it. The reason the public sector isn't able to gear them up is because that's not what our conservative governments want. We give away money left and right for arenas or cleaning up abandone wells, but March of 2020 we were planning on laying off over 700 nurses, then the pandemic hit. It's lunacy. Of course all our money can't go to healthcare, but maybe we shouldn't be spending it on arenas, or oil war rooms.
Getting into an RN program is difficult, the first step is to create more spaces, people will fill them. Does every RN need to have a 3.8 gpa to get in, or would 3.6 be good enough, why is it based strictly on grades? I know doctors who didn't get in on their first try and by all accounts are great doctors, create more spots. Once you have the staff you take all the operating rooms, and make sure they are running 24/7.
Once you're staffed up and running, then you can look at smaller facilities to fill in the gaps if needed. We aren't doing that. Our government is trying to skip the part where we improve sector.
Fast tracking foreign nurses etc is fine. We need to keep the nurses we have as well. They are generally stretched thin, and burnout etc is real. If there's turnover that's also costly. We also shouldn't be REQUIRING nurses to work overtime constantly. LPN's are underpaid (at least last I checked) and they expanded their roles just a couple years ago. At the same time it seems as though we have been hiring more LPN's to work under RN's when we should be trying to increase the number of RN's. At least that's the impression I got from a nursing friend, but that could just be her department, I'm unsure.
Open spots, pay people appropriately, have facilities running efficiently, and for the love of god stop fighting with HCW's and constantly trying to lay them off. If hospital workers aren't working at 110% that's ok.