Number of newly licensed Quebec nurses reaches 10-year low

The number of new nursing licences issued in Quebec has declined for a third consecutive year, reaching a 10-year low as the province struggles to staff its medical facilities and provide timely care to patients.

The professional order that regulates nursing in the province — Ordre des infirmières et infirmiers du Québec — published its latest workforce report on Thursday, showing it granted 2,864 licences between April 2022 and March 2023, down from 3,565 in the preceding 12 months and 3,629 the year before that. There were 4,183 new nursing licences in 2019-20.

The order nevertheless reported an increase in its total number of members — from 79,748 in March 2022 to 83,418 a year later — continuing a long-standing upward trend. Yet only 92.6 per cent of them were employed in the province, the lowest proportion in the last 10 years.

However, in a news release Thursday, the organization highlighted a 20 per cent increase in the number of specialized nurse practitioners — nurses with advanced degrees who wield additional powers, including to prescribe treatments.

There were 1,314 nurse practitioners in Quebec in March 2023, up from 1,097 in 2022 and 842 in 2021. Their numbers have swelled 134 per cent since 2019.

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That’s compared to 3,565 new licences during the same 12-month period a year before.

The workforce data land amid a contentious labour dispute between Quebec and its largest nurses union, the 80,000-member Fédération Interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec — known as the FIQ — and as health-care facilities contend with staffing shortages. Unions representing more than 550,000 public sector workers went on strike in November, and the FIQ is the only one without some sort of agreement with the province; working conditions are the major sticking point.

Quebec’s statistics agency says nursing was one of the most in-demand professions in the third quarter of 2023, with more than 10,400 vacant jobs for registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses.

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Meanwhile, both health-care wait-lists and emergency room wait times have steadily increased in recent years. There were 164,168 people awaiting non-cardiac surgery in Quebec at the beginning of December 2023, up from 129,371 in December 2020.

In emergency rooms, the seven-day average wait time to see a doctor after triage was 3.14 hours on Jan. 8, 2024, compared to 1.82 hours two years earlier.