EDMONTON – Twenty-eight per cent of nurses in Alberta work full time compared with 56 per cent nationally, say provincial health officials.
The imbalance is prompting new efforts by Alberta Health Services to hire more full-time nurses, including new graduates, to ensure Albertans get adequate care.
“Let’s see if we can move that 28 per cent up a bit higher,” Alberta Health Services board chairman Stephen Lockwood said Thursday after a board meeting in Red Deer. “Is the national average the right place or not? I don’t know if it is or not.”
With thousands of Alberta health-services workers poised to retire in the next five years while patient needs increase because of a growing and aging population, the province is facing a staffing crunch, says information released Thursday by Alberta Health Services. About 5,700 clinical employees – eight per cent of the AHS workforce – could retire, including 2,200 registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses. The health authority expects to need 35,000 new workers in five years – fewer if AHS can convince more nurses to work full time.
“AHS needs everyone,” says the news release from the health authority. “There will be a nursing job for absolutely every qualified nurse who wants to work with AHS.”
That’s good news for students taking nursing courses at MacEwan University, where approximately 140 students will graduate in December to become RNs and another 60 will become registered psychiatric nurses, said Sharon Bookhalter, dean of the university’s faculty of health and community studies.
“So for this to come out now indicating that there’s an impetus to hire graduates is really good news for our students, because many of them might have come in to the programs when things were up and down with Alberta Health Services,” Bookhalter said.
The health authority will try to hire all the 750 RNs and registered psychiatric nurses who recently graduated and will be looking for work this December. AHS will also hire at least 70 per cent of Alberta’s graduating registered nurses under the United Nurses of Alberta’s 2010-13 collective agreement, the news release said. Health authority officials will also recruit new nurses this month at career fairs in Red Deer, Calgary, Edmonton and Grande Prairie.
“Recruitment alone will not enable AHS to provide the level of care and service Albertans expect and deserve in the future,” the news release said.
AHS president and CEO Dr. Chris Eagle said the health authority wants more nurses working full time but some employees prefer part-time hours.
“We’ve been very successful in recruiting nurses in Alberta, and part of the success factor has to do with the ability of the individual nurses to be fairly flexible about their employment conditions; and this is apparently what they want, is to have a significant amount of flexibility in the workspace.”
If a higher percentage of nurses work full time, patients will be better cared for and see the same nurses more regularly so they feel more comfortable discussing their health-care needs, the health authority said.
The portion of part-time and casual nursing staff in Alberta has grown in recent decades because those are the jobs that were posted and filled, said Heather Smith, president of the United Nurses of Alberta, which represents approximately 25,000 nurses across the province. The employer preferred to have mostly part-time employees that could be called in as needed, Smith said.
“So we sort of slid into these higher and higher numbers of part-time employees,” she said.
There is debate on what the right mix of full-time and part-time nursing staff should be, Smith said.
“In Ontario, they would suggest it should be 70 per cent full time,” she said.
“There are different life factors that contribute to an individual working full time or part time – whether or not they have young children, what their age is, because at the end of their career it’s more difficult to work full time; what kind of shifts are available. Certain employees, depending on their life circumstances, may not be willing to work 12-hour shifts, so it’s not an easy fix.”
The health authority needs to use incentives to make full-time work more appealing rather than strategies that make part-time work less attractive, Smith said.
Stressful, physically demanding jobs in busy, understaffed hospitals mean many nurses don’t want to work more hours, said Matthew Douma, a registered nurse who works part time while taking a master’s degree in nursing through the University of Toronto.
“It’s difficult to work full-time in that setting without some personal fallout, without experiencing burnout,” said Douma, an emergency-department nurse at the Royal Alexandra Hospital.
The staffing situation is not unique to Alberta, said Health Minister Fred Horne.
“I don’t know any health minister in Canada that isn’t struggling with the issue of how to hire and retain more nurses,” Horne said Thursday.
“There’s two issues – there’s the recruitment in terms of numbers but then there’s also making the best use of the nurses that we have in place, so that will continue to be a priority in Alberta. We’re talking a lot about team approaches to care, and nurses are going to play a critical role in that.”
The AHS board also heard a report Thursday from the head of its human-resource committee, Dr. Ruth Collin-Nakai, who said AHS workers in 2011-12 averaged 12 days absent per year, with just over 11 of those days taken as paid or unpaid sick days. Health officials are trying to determine the cause of the absentee rates that are “significantly higher than in the private sector or in most of the public sector,” said Collins-Nakai.
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