By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

Health Minister to meet with nurses’ union Wednesday to talk staff shortage

Jul 26, 2018 | 4:37 PM

Alberta’s Health Minister has agreed to meet with the United Nurses of Alberta next week in an effort to resolve a staff shortage crisis that is causing exceedingly longer wait times at Red Deer Regional Hospital.

Minister Sarah Hoffman will meet with union representatives Wednesday at the Legislature in Edmonton.

In a statement, the minister’s press secretary Aaron Manton says on behalf of Hoffman, “Our government is committed to working with front line workers to find solutions to strengthen front line health care. We have received UNA’s request for a meeting and will be sitting down with their leadership in the coming days.”

David Harrigan, Director of Labour Relations with the United Nurses, says they tried to refrain from making this issue a political one, first attempting to come to a ‘practical solution’ with the people who run the facility.

The union met with Alberta Health Services earlier this month and told them they needed 27 new full-time hires.

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AHS then told the media they’d be posting for 15, but two days later came out and said they’d only be hiring six FTE positions while eliminating seven, ultimately resulting in a staff reduction of 1.5 FTEs.

That’s why UNA has out to the health minister, Harrigan explains, adding he has no explanation for why AHS changed their tune the way they did.

“They said the initial numbers were incorrect and when we asked how they arrived at those numbers, the only answer they had was that that’s what their operations people found by crunching the numbers,” Harrigan told rdnewsNOW on Thursday. They said that’s what they came up with, but I have no idea what that means.”

At the end of the day, Harrigan believes it shouldn’t take much arm-pulling to get what they’re asking for because it will ultimately save a lot of money.

He explains nurses get paid double for any overtime they work, and with 27 FTEs worth of work being done and nurses earning a base salary of roughly $100,000 a year, there’s more than $2.5 million at play.

Nurses are collectively working between 100-200 overtime hours each day, he says.

“Eventually people get too exhausted and certainly everyone is trying to give the best care possible, he says. “But when you’re exhausted and working double time every day, sometimes you’re just not able to do what you’d normally do if you were only working eight hours a day.”

So while the issue is only in its infancy of becoming politicized, Harrigan says perhaps it’ll have to head more in that direction.

“In terms of the local MLAs, we haven’t even reached out to them and maybe we should have, but certainly we will start doing that,” he says of Red Deer NDP MLAs Kim Schreiner and Barb Miller, who both have experience either working with unions or in the healthcare sector.

“We’re cautiously optimistic,” Harrigan says about Wednesday’s meeting. “The problem is we were optimistic after the last meeting in Red Deer, so we don’t want to blindly believe that somehow everything’s going to be magically fixed.

“It’s positive that the government is willing to at least meet with us and hear what we have to say.”