Majority of care workers return from administrative leave as COVID rules fall

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2022 (1496 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most of the health-care workers who went on leave when Manitoba made COVID-19 vaccines or regular testing mandatory for front-line care staff are returning to work now that those requirements are lifted.

About 13 per cent (15 of 119) of direct care workers on administrative leave have said they aren’t coming back to their positions, a Shared Health spokesperson said Friday.

The provincial agency didn’t provide other figures nor a regional breakdown to show where the majority of those workers are employed.

Shared Health stated: “Most of the 119 direct care workers in the health-care system who were on unpaid leaves of absence related to compliance with public health orders have returned to work or are in the process of doing so.”

Manitoba issued a public health order requiring front-line health-care workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or agree to be regularly tested for the virus as of Oct. 18, 2021.

More than 100 workers went on unpaid leave as a result, with the majority of those in the Southern Health region.

As of late February, there were still 1,500 unvaccinated workers who required regular testing and 119 on unpaid leave: 75 in Southern Health, 16 in Prairie Mountain, 13 in the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, eight at Shared Health, four in Interlake-Eastern, and three in Northern Health.

The province removed those vaccine and testing requirements for health-care workers when it lifted all proof-of-vaccine requirements for Manitobans on March 1. Indoor mask requirements are being lifted March 15 in public places other than health-care facilities.

Some clinics have decided to keep mandatory testing in place for health-care staff who are unvaccinated or don’t disclose their vaccination status.

C.W. Wiebe Medical Centre is one of them. The Winkler clinic has extended vaccine and testing requirements for staff until the end of the month.

“We will review at that time. We wanted to wait a couple of weeks past the lifting of the mask mandate in the area to see if that created an increase in cases or not, so we’ve deferred it till the end of March,” said clinic administrator Jim Neufeld.

A bigger issue is at play when it comes to staff shortages and nurses and support workers going on leave, said Winkler-based physician Dr. Ganesan Abbu: burnout and stress on the health-care system. Abbu said he believes more staff have left because of burnout than because of the vaccine or testing requirements.

“There were very few nurses that actually stepped aside because of vaccination. I think the issues of shortages on the medical floor as well as in the emergency department have been longstanding and pre-date COVID,” he said. “COVID just made it worse.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca