Nursing recruitment and retention in Northwestern Ontario comes with its own special set of challenges, says Ontario’s chief nursing officer.
Debra Bournes on Tuesday said not all cities are created equal in the province when it comes to desirability for nurses to work.
That means finding unique ways to entice, attract and keep the men and women who are often at the heart of health care in Ontario.
“People always say to me, do we have a nursing shortage in Ontario? And my answer is it depends on where you are. I think it’s more of a distribution problem than it is necessarily that we don’t have enough nurses,” Bournes said.
“And we do have to find ways of enticing them to come to the North. And that’s why particularly in some of the rural and more remote areas we need to put some of the things that nurses say they want in their work environment to draw them up there.”
She pointed to the Ontario Nursing Workforce Alliance, which allows larger teaching hospitals to hire new grads and second them to remote and rural areas that have trouble staffing, the end goal trying to encourage some grads to relocate to smaller communities permanently.
“At least they won’t have to rely on agencies and one-offs all the time,” Bournes said.
Province-wide, nurses must continue to be challenged and shown there are opportunities for them in the field.
However, there is no one single answer, she said.
“Nurses come into the profession because they want to make a difference in people’s lives and they want to provide patient care. But they also want to contribute to quality improvement projects, the quality of their work environment and they want to continue their education,” Bournes said.
“So it’s helping them to create environments where they feel they’re honoured and respected for what they do, but also creating opportunities for them to contribute in ways beyond just providing direct patient care.”
Do those things and hospitals and other health-care facilities will experience less turnover and lower days lost to sick time, she added.
