Canada graduated 3,700 nurses last year, but it needed 10,000.
Janet Storch, director of the University of Victoria’s nursing school, said the gap will remain unless governments put more money into educating new nurses, retaining those who want to leave, and recalling those who have quit.
Storch is president of the Canadian Association of the University Schools of Nursing western region, which held a conference Feb. 23-24 in Saskatoon about the nursing shortage.
Michael Villeneuve, of Health Canada’s office of nursing policy, said governments, hospitals and other employers are trying to work with nursing groups to come up with some solutions to the shortage, whether it be better workplace conditions or training more people.
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“It’s fine to say we need more, but where are we going to get them?”
Canada’s 310,519 nurses make up the largest group of professional women in the country, Villeneuve said. But they are overwhelmingly female and white.
When Villeneuve asked Grade 7 boys why they would not consider nursing as a career, he heard the standard concern about too much work for too few dollars. But he was surprised to hear the boys’ perception of how smart nurses have to be based on television images of them as strong women contradicting doctors and making split second life-or-death decisions.
As for getting nurses to look like the rest of Canada’s population, he said it will take time and targeted recruitment before the nursing workforce is ethnically diverse.
Presenters at the conference discussed two main training issues: workplace concerns and the battle over qualifications.
Storch said her project included talking to nurses about ethics and working conditions. She said when nurses talked about actual practices versus what should happen, they raised questions about who decides which lives are sustained by heroic, expensive measures that ultimately don’t work.
They told stories of power and control where some things were done for a doctor’s convenience that the nurse felt weren’t right. Rural nurses said they asked people to watch out for sick neighbors because home care resources were scarce, even though that compromised the ill person’s confidentiality.
“Nurses go home at the end of the day feeling they should have said something or worried about something, rather than pleased with their day.”
Patricia Marck of the University of Alberta said her project examined what happened once technology was brought in to ease the workload.
She found a nurse’s job became based on efficiency and how quickly she could put patients through. That led to nurses looking at machine monitors while ignoring the person lying in the bed.
Talking to patients was seen as wasting time. Marck was sympathetic when a nurse raised the issue that a technologist who had 10 months of training could tell nurses how to take care of patients.
“We don’t want to avoid technology, but articulate our role and do more research to prove nurses’ value to patients.”
While the public wants to add more nurses at their bedsides, association members have concerns about what might be lost in the rush to churn out bodies.
Few get degree
Only 22 percent of all nurses working in Canada have a four-year university degree. Most received diplomas in two- and three-year courses offered through colleges or hospitals. While nurses’ regulatory associations want all new nurses to have university degrees, the shortage’s urgency has led to a slide in that academic goal.
Nursing educators from Manitoba and Saskatchewan told the conference of the political lobby and public awareness campaigns that led those provincial governments to add money and seats for diploma courses, which graduate nurses in half the time that universities take.
Wendy McBride, executive director of CAUSN, argued that every other profession has a bachelor degree as a minimum entry level. She supported degrees because of “the demands on nurses, new technology, the acuity of patients, the need to make judgments and the need to be educated to deal with that and to be able to work independently and to be prepared to work as equals with other professions in a health-care multidisciplinary team.”
But one delegate said the qualifications battle will continue until nurses can explain to the public the difference between being nursed by a person with a degree versus a diploma.
