CAMPBELLTON – In order to mitigate the need for costly travel nurses, NBNU and its employers agreed to a voluntary Redeployment Initiative. This joint agreement allows the regional health authorities to seek out qualified nurses in New Brunswick and ask that they temporarily relocate to another facility in the province to provide qualified nursing care in critical shortages. As an example, Horizon has used it successfully in the Miramichi Regional Hospital.
The key component of the joint agreement is that it is voluntary. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not acceptable – not when it creates safety issues at both ends.
We have learned that on October 18, Vitalité plans to force some nurse practitioners from Dalhousie to abandon their primary care practices to work in the emergency room of the Campbellton Regional Hospital as registered nurses.
This is a deeply troubling departure from the voluntary redeployment initiative agreed to in negotiations because it carries unacceptable risks for primary care patients. When a nurse practitioner leaves, closes, or is absent from their practice for an extended period, they must take the necessary steps to minimize the impact on their patients, particularly by ensuring continuity of care and access to another appropriate health care provider.
Forcing these nurse practitioners to abandon their patient roster without being allowed the appropriate time to meet their standards is inappropriate and unacceptable. Patients are being put at serious risk with no other option than flooding an already strained emergency department in the area.
The shortage of registered nurses in the Campbellton Regional Hospital is not a new issue. Over the last several years, that facility has relied heavily on travel nurses to maintain services. They knew they would need a different solution when agency nurses were no longer an option.
It is inexcusable for Vitalité to put itself, its patients and clients, plus its valuable nurses and nurse practitioners, in such a foreseeable emergency. In Sainte-Anne-de-Kent, when the ER has been too short-staffed to run properly, patients have been diverted to Moncton. It’s not a perfect solution, but it works and has been shown to carry far less risk for patients. We’re forced to question why this ill-conceived band-aid solution has been implemented instead.
It is equally inconceivable that the Minister of Health and the Premier should say that patient attachment and primary care are vital, all while Vitalité has allowed their own mishandling of their staffing challenge to disrupt primary care for the residents in the Campbellton and Dalhousie region.
The bottom line: Vitalité’s poor planning and inability to collaborate with the very professionals that provide vital health care has now become an unnecessary emergency for patients, clients, registered nurses and nurse practitioners. Upstream collaboration will always be more impactful than 11th-hour autocracy, and NBNU is calling for an immediate stop to the forced and involuntary redeployment of nurse practitioners from Dalhousie to Campbellton.
Paula Doucet
President, New Brunswick Nurses Union
-30-
The New Brunswick Nurses Union (NBNU) is a labour organization of approximately 9,500 nurses who are employed in various health care facilities throughout the province of New Brunswick.
Media Contact
Alix Saulnier
Communications Officer
[email protected]
(506) 453-7265
