Shared Health nurses wait for final contract offer

Shared Health nurses wait for final contract offer

Nurses employed by Shared Health are waiting for a final offer after they were the only group provincewide to reject a proposed contract last month.

“Once that is received, we will inform members,” the Manitoba Nurses Union said Wednesday.

A Shared Health spokesperson said bargaining is ongoing for about 4,100 nurses who work at Health Sciences Centre, CancerCare Manitoba, Diagnostic Services in the province, Selkirk Mental Health Centre, the Manitoba Adolescent Treatment Centre, the Children’s Centre for Rehabilitation and Eden Health Care Services.

Nurses under Shared Health were the only holdouts among nurses from six health regions across Manitoba. New contracts were approved by primarily narrow margins following union member votes in May for Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, Prairie Mountain Health Authority, Interlake-Eastern Health Authority, Northern Health Authority and Southern Health.

Meetings accomplish something that an email never could while respecting people’s time, building relationships

There are few workplace experiences that unite employees quite like complaining about meetings. Ask almost anyone what frustrates them at work, and somewhere on the list will be the meeting that could have been an email. We’ve all been there. Thirty minutes scheduled for a simple update somehow turns into an hour. Half the attendees don’t need to be there. Someone shares their screen for ten minutes trying to find the right document. The meeting ends with everyone wondering what was actually decided.

It’s no surprise that organizations are looking for ways to reduce meeting fatigue. Every hour spent in a meeting is an hour that isn’t spent serving customers, solving problems, writing reports, or completing projects. As calendars become increasingly crowded, employees often find themselves working longer days simply to catch up on the work they couldn’t accomplish because they were in meetings.

The obvious solution seems simple: hold fewer meetings. In many cases, that’s exactly the right answer. Routine updates, policy reminders, project status reports, and information that doesn’t require discussion can often be shared through email and chat platforms. Not every piece of information deserves everyone’s calendar.

But eliminating meetings altogether would create a different problem, especially as more organizations embrace hybrid and remote work.

WRHA directs three care homes to accommodate surge of hospital patients

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority has directed three long-term care centres to make space for hospital patients, citing “exceptionally high demand for care across the health-care system.”

Men’s recovery home dedicated to ‘homeless hero’ Faron Hall’s memory

Faron Hall never got the chance to begin recovery. Once heralded as Winnipeg’s “homeless hero” after twice plunging into the Red River to save strangers from drowning, Hall told St. Boniface Street Links executive director Marion Willis shortly before his death in 2014 that he wanted help for his alcoholism.