Emergency room nurses at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal’s east end refused to work Saturday morning because they were understaffed.
More than 15 workers conducted a “sit-in” of around two hours to denounce their difficult working conditions. The mandatory overtime and ratios of patients per nurse are too high, which pushes many workers to exhaustion, according to the Quebec Nurses Federation.
Nurses concluded they were going to be missing three employees when they got into work at 7:45 a.m. Saturday, according to their union.
Denis Cloutier, Vice-President of the union, explained to The Canadian Press that their members chose to protest by doing a “sit-in” at the ER to put pressure on their employer.
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A few of the nurses still worked in order to take over for the night shift workers, some of whom had reportedly been working for 16 hours.
The president of the union said the night-shift nurses did not protest against the overtime hours that were imposed, but the day shift workers protested in solidarity for their hard work.
“A nurse has a professional responsibility, therefore those who were already there working the night shift already had patients to take care of,” said Cloutier to The Canadian Press.
“They could not spontaneously stop working. It was the others who delayed their duties to put pressure on their employer in order to find a solution.”
The director of the hospital, Lina Spagnolo, said Saturday that the three absent nurses did not show at the last minute because of illness, which complicated their tasks.
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“We could’ve transfered a few patients towards care units, which is the normal trajectory. Therefore, that’s what we did to diminish the rate of occupancy in the emergency room,” said Spagnolo.
The director recognized that even Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital can’t escape the lack of workers that affects the entire Quebec health sector.
The Quebec Nurses Federation counted that around 529 nurses were on disability leave out 4,500 members.
“The recruitment, the retention, it’s all that that makes in sort that we go through difficult times,” said Spagnolo.
— With files from The Canadian Press’ Ugo Giguère