Craig: Let’s fix Canada’s nursing shortage before it gets even worse

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The COVID-19 pandemic is history, but the shortage of health-care workers is not.
I will be one of the new Registered Nurses (RN), a fresh graduate this June, with an Honours Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. I’m told I will have my pick of many available jobs and I should be thrilled, but there is too much for all of us, including me, to be concerned about in the Canadian health-care system.

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There is an inadequate supply of Canadian student nurses being educated to provide health care in the future. Even if new nursing schools were suddenly created, there would be difficulty finding qualified instructors to fill these new positions. These are troubling realities.

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Canada will be short more than 115,000 nurses by 2030, and throughout the world 13 million more nurses will be needed over the next 10 years. This is true even though  nurses now represent the largest portion of health workers, with more than 28 million worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

The nursing shortage was a problem before the COVID-19 crisis; however, the pandemic and its strain on health services brought the issue to the forefront. The pandemic also increased the nursing shortage through increased sick leave by nurses, unprecedented rates of burnout, and many retirements and early retirements.

In 2022 the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU) reported that one-third of the working RNs in Canada were 50 years of age or older, with many nearing retirement. To further complicate the health-care situation, Statistics Canada reports that our country has an aging population, and by 2030 more than one-fifth of the population will be senior citizens, 65 or older.

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But there won’t be enough nurses.

During the pandemic, health-care facilities were encouraged to protect their workforces and make extra efforts to nurture the mental health of nurses and other health-care workers. I hope that the measures implemented to strengthen the mental health of staff under pressure will be maintained as an enhancement of working conditions, even after the pandemic.

We must reinforce the need to maintain a stable workforce of registered nurses and other health-care professionals. It has been suggested that the nursing profession has to be “rebranded.” There is too much emphasis on the caring nature of nurses and not enough attention paid to the science of nursing and the medical knowledge acquired by professional nurses.

As well, more individuals need to be recruited as potential nursing students, eliminating any bias regarding gender, race or culture. Individuals with disabilities should also be invited to consider careers in nursing. There is a diverse range of jobs in health care, and so there should be a diverse range of qualified candidates for the jobs.

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Schools and educators must think “outside the box” to recruit and develop more instructors, while also producing more qualified nurses to strengthen our crippled health-care workforce. More spots must be offered in colleges and universities to educate nurses, but there is also a great need to offer more encouragement and incentives to senior nurses to help educate and train the student nurses.

Next time you are in the hospital, know that some of the RNs who are taking care of you are also acting as on-the-job instructors to student nurses, our future nurses, the backbone of our health-care system. I want to thank all the RNs who reinforced my education and training for the last four years. I could not have graduated without you.

Sarah-Jean Craig will graduate in June from the University of Ottawa/Algonquin College BScN Program.

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