Private nursing agency in full flight

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This article was published 13/05/2023 (896 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg family has started a private nursing agency after spending a year in and out of the hospital with their son. They hope to improve conditions for nurses and patients, they say.

Rex De Castro and Simone Jannetta spend roughly 15 hours per day matching nurses and health-care aides with shifts in Manitoba and abroad.

“We’ve had so much growth in the last couple months that we can’t… quite keep up,” Jannetta, 36, said.

Since August, NurseX has drawn around 100 nurses and 40 aides and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the workers, the co-founders said.

It’s a much different schedule than two and a half years ago: then, Jannetta and her son, Boston, were in the Children’s Hospital, desperate for a stem cell transplant.

Boston, who’s half-Filipino and half-Caucasian, needed a stem cell match for a rare disease that caused his immune system to attack itself. The situation garnered national attention, including that of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and resulted in 3,000 people signing a registry to be a potential donor.

Ultimately, Jannetta — a half match for her baby — gave her own stem cells. Boston survived.

“I consider us the luckiest people on earth,” said De Castro, who frequented the hospital at the time.

He’d visited the ward before: the family’s first child, Beatrix, was hospitalized as a baby for an auto-immune condition.

Nurses and health-care aides were always around to help, often picking up extra shifts or working late, especially in Boston’s case, De Castro said.

“They’re hugging us, they’re crying with us and trying their hardest to make sure that Boston’s OK,” he said. “They’re the ones saving my children’s (lives).”

Jannetta has worked as an emergency room nurse, among other nursing roles, for 10 years. Burnout is common, she noted. Still, she loves the job.

“It’s so fulfilling,” she said. “It’s a truly selfless career… you make a difference in people’s lives.”

The couple launched NurseX last August. Jannetta was the first nurse for hire; the business grew through word of mouth.

“We’re actually trying to create something where nurses and health-care aides can work when they want, where they want, so they don’t have that burnout,” Janetta said.

Health workers often occupy part-time public-sector roles that guarantee shifts. They’ll pick up additional private gigs, choosing the date and location.

“We noticed, we couldn’t be the only people that had personal issues going on where we needed flexibility,” Jannetta said. “Even if you’re not full-time private, if you’re just doing it as a side job with a part-time government-run job, it takes away some of that burnout.”

It’s a way to diversify work, she added.

The couple competes with other private companies for contracts, which facilities issue when they’re short-staffed.

Once NurseX gets a contract, it’ll email its list of nurses or aides (who are not staff, but contractors), to see who’s available.

NurseX confirms staffing with the facility, and workers are sent on their way.

“As time goes by, we’re trying to make a platform digitally… where (we can) streamline it,” De Castro, 38, said.

Currently, the couple sends out hundreds of emails daily. De Castro and Jannetta envision an online platform where contractors can click on a map and bid for a shift in an instant.

For now, they don’t have time to build one. They’re handling contracts, paying staff and getting money from facilities while raising two children under the age of five.

“It feels like we’re working the business and putting out fires at the same time,” De Castro said. “It’s non-stop.”

Nurse and aide pay depends on the contract and the nurse’s qualifications, he added. Across the country, a licensed practical nurse might earn between $40 and $80 an hour through NurseX. That could bump up to $50 to $120 an hour for a registered nurse.

Hourly nursing wages in Manitoba’s public sector range from $30 to $65.

“We give as much as we can to the nurse and take the smallest amount to stay afloat,” De Castro said. “We’re taking a really low profit margin… We haven’t even paid ourselves, because we keep re-rolling the money into the business to be able to grow.”

The family started NurseX using cash from a cleaning company De Castro runs and around $60,000 in loans from Futurpreneur and BDC.

NurseX pays contractors by invoicing healthcare facilities, many of which get money from the province. The company has sent nurses across Manitoba, Alberta and Ontario.

“There’s a shortage everywhere,” De Castro said.

Neither he nor Jannetta believes private healthcare will solve Manitoba’s woes.

There are issues with private agencies, they said: workers are choosing their shifts, meaning too many people could bid for one spot while another goes unfilled. Private nurses don’t get the onboarding of a public health nurse; they need to be experienced and fast learners. And if a facility can fill shifts with its own employees, private nurses get axed.

Still, private agencies keep nurses who might otherwise leave, in health care, if even just part time, they added.

“If (the public health system) started giving the same amounts (of money) to the health care professionals, I’d shut this business down with a smile on my face,” De Castro said. “This isn’t the answer, but in the meantime, it’s a small solution to help ease the nurses’ and health-care aides’ pains and protect patient safety.”

The more staff, the better for patients, Jannetta added.

“We have our public health care system that is doing the best that they possibly can,” she said. “For those facilities that are just short and need extra staff, that’s where we come in.”

De Castro said he’d happily start a different business, and Jannetta could return to nursing full-time (after an upcoming maternity leave). There can be room for both public and private nursing, Jannetta added.

Private agency nurses spent 662,564 hours in Manitoba health regions last year, up 31 per cent from 2021, Manitoba Nurses Union figures show.

Private nursing agency payments will be “a fraction of a single percentage point” in Manitoba’s overall health budget, a Shared Health spokesperson wrote in a statement, adding the latest fiscal year’s numbers aren’t finalized.

The provincial government spent more than $40 million on private agency nurses in 2021-22. It has around 75 agreements with nursing agencies across Manitoba.

“Shared Health and other health system employers in Manitoba are committed to reducing the province’s level of reliance on agency nurses and overtime,” the spokesperson wrote.

They pointed to initiatives including creating a “provincial float pool” of nurses and upping the number of nursing seats to 400 in Manitoba post-secondary schools.

“What (NurseX is) doing is going to be transformative,” said Caroline Ksiazek, Futurpreneur’s business development manager for Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

“They’re tackling an issue that has been top of mind for so many Manitobans.

Futurpreneur watched as NurseX’s monthly employee costs substantially increased — more than doubling — between last August and March of 2023.

“It’s definitely a business that’s going to be scaling,” Ksiazek said.

Futurpreneur is not taking a piece of NurseX, added Micah Anshan, Futurpreneur’s director of government relations.

NurseX plans to expand across Canada.

Private agencies make it difficult to attract workers back to the public sector because the pay is much higher, according to a Manitoba Nurses Union source. Also, patients may not become as familiar with a private sector nurse as they would with a public system nurse, the source added.

gabrielle.piche@winnipegfreepress.com