By rdnewsNOW staff

Still no new RN hires in Red Deer: Union

Jul 17, 2018 | 12:40 PM

United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) says nothing has been done to address Emergency Room staffing shortages at Red Deer Regional Hospital nearly a month after the union filed a grievance with the province.

In a release, UNA says “heavy use of overtime is still required to keep the Red Deer Emergency Department in operation.”

The union says on July 6 more than 368 hours of overtime and additional shifts were worked in the Emergency Department on the weekend of July 6-8.

According to UNA, nearly 200 hours that need to be staffed by Registered Nurses had still not been filled in the Red Deer ER schedule for this coming weekend, not including overtime and additional shifts that RNs have already signed up to work.

UNA Labour Relations Director David Harrigan says not a single vacancy for emergency room RNs is currently posted on the AHS website. UNA has formally requested that an arbitrator be appointed to resolve the June 19 grievance, which calls for the equivalent of 27 full-time new RN hires.  

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“At the end of the June 28 meeting, we believed we had an understanding that AHS would immediately post some of the positions that are needed,” Harrigan said. “We were pleased and believed the problem had been significantly reduced.

“However, since then, with no jobs posted, the problems in the department have continued, including heavy reliance on RNs working overtime,” Harrigan said. “AHS needs to live up to its commitment and immediately start hiring nurses to ease the staffing crisis in Red Deer, as promised. Spending additional taxpayers’ dollars on arbitration is ridiculous.”

AHS pointed to staff vacations as the cause of the problem, UNA says, and promised it would be swiftly resolved.

“It is important to understand that this is not a problem caused by a cluster of vacations, but by chronic understaffing at this facility over a long period of time,” Harrigan explained in a UNA news release on June 25.

UNA’s grievance states that the employer, AHS, has failed to post vacancies in the Red Deer Regional Hospital Emergency Department, resulting in mandatory overtime and additional shifts for RNs equivalent to 27 full-time positions over the previous 10 weeks.

United Nurses of Alberta represents more than 30,000 Alberta Registered Nurses, Registered Psychiatric Nurses and allied health care workers in Alberta.

(With file from UNA media release)