Over 400 nursing vacancies across Waterloo region and Brant County

Hundreds of nursing jobs are waiting to be filled at local hospitals as the health care staffing crisis continues across the province.

Despite new regulations that will allow internationally trained nurses to get on the job sooner, local officials say that’s likely to be more of a minor improvement than a major shift.

“Every day that goes by, the vacancy numbers increase,” said Ontario Nurses Association (ONA) President Cathryn Hoy. “They are leaving everyday, retiring, going to the states and finding other career paths.”

While the problem isn’t new for Ontario hospitals, the ONA says it’s getting worse. Hoy says in some cases the patient load for nurses is doubling.

“I know of a mental health unit that had 31 patients and had one RN and one RPN,” Hoy said. “It’s not typical to have 15 patients on a medical unit, it’s impossible, it’s absolutely impossible. If you add up all the duties on a perfect day, if you had 15 patients its 24.5 hours of labour and you have 12 hours, how do you meet those targets? You can’t. Patients will suffer, and patients will die.”

NURSING VACANCIES BY HOSPITAL

Grand River Hospital says they have 104 nursing vacancies.

At St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener there are 71 vacancies for nurses and specialized medical technicians.

Cambridge Memorial Hospital has 68 nursing vacancies.

In Brant County, they’re looking to fill 178 nursing positions.

In total, there are 420 nursing vacancies across Waterloo region and Brant County.

Guelph General Hospital has 87 full-time and part-time nursing vacancies.

Two out of seven operating rooms were closed at St. Mary’s Hospital last week.

RECRUITMENT TROUBLES

Some officials say this is the worst they’ve ever seen.

“I have never personally had this much exposure to this amount of health and human resource constraint,” said Jill Schitka, vice-president of patient services and chief of nursing at St. Mary’s General Hospital. “It’s not ever really been like this in my working career.”

St. Mary’s General Hospital said the number of people leaving is starting to stabilize, but it's bringing people in that's proving difficult.

“We are not seeing an increased number of terminations or resignations in the last six months, it’s more that we are seeing the building up of vacancies, so we weren’t necessarily able to fill all the vacancies from six months ago, we are adding to our vacancy numbers,” said Kaitlyn Pendergast, talent management consultant for St. Mary’s General Hospital.

As for the new provincial regulations allowing new and internationally trained nurses to get to work faster, officials say it's not enough to right the ship.

“I’m not sure it’s going to give the numbers that we need,” Schitka said. “We matched with two international nurses through one of the programs with the college of nurses, but other than that, we are not seeing a lot of uptake of internationally trained nurses to come here.”