Forced-leave health-care workers quit rather than get vaccinated or tested

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This article was published 17/11/2021 (1581 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nineteen Manitoba health-care workers who were on unpaid leave after refusing to take regular COVID-19 tests instead of being vaccinated have quit.

Health-care providers who are not vaccinated and work at hospitals, personal care homes and in home care have been required to take a rapid antigen test within 48 hours of starting their shift since Oct. 18, under provincial public-health orders.

As of Tuesday, 151 workers were on unpaid leave for refusing to take the tests, down from 189 two weeks earlier, Shared Health reports. The majority were from the Southern Health region.

The provincial health services organization did not specify whether the resignations were among nurses, health-care aides, support staff or other health professionals, or which regions lost employees to the test-or-vaccinate requirement.

“That is a shame that it’s come to this over vaccination,” said Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson. “That’s a significant number of health-care workers that we need in the system right now.”

Jackson said she did not know if any nurses have resigned over the testing policy for unvaccinated staff, but said every available nurse is needed to address critical staffing shortages.

Shared Health said 98 employees from Southern Health, 22 from Prairie Mountain, 12 from Winnipeg, eight from Interlake-Eastern, seven from Shared Health and four from the Northern Health region are on unpaid leave due to non-compliance with the public-health order.

In Southern Health, where COVID-19 vaccination levels are the lowest and spread of the virus is increasing, Jackson said there are significant concerns related to staffing at health facilities.

As of Tuesday, three outbreaks had been declared at the Portage District General Hospital, with as many as nine staff testing positive.

An outbreak at Third Crossing Manor, a 50-bed personal-care home in Gladstone, continued to grow on Tuesday with 33 staff and 37 residents testing positive to date. At the nearby Neepawa Health Centre, located in the Prairie Mountain region, 24 people have caught COVID-19 in an outbreak, including nine staff.

Jackson said facilities are short-handed and nurses in the region are taking on unsustainable workloads as mandated overtime increases. Meanwhile, the reliance on private-agency nurses in facilities is growing while nurses are redeployed to cover vacancies and assist in outbreaks, she said.

“It’s just moving nurses from one area where they’re short-staffed to another area where they’re even more short-staffed,” Jackson said.

“What I’m hearing from nurses is that they’re desperate for staff. We’d gladly take anyone who would come to help, but what we’re seeing more is nurses leaving.”

As of Tuesday, Shared Health said 36,349 direct-care providers have said they are fully vaccinated while another 1,726 workers have said they are not and require testing. The overall number of health-care providers requiring testing has dropped over the past two weeks by 125, and so far, 23 workers who were previously placed on unpaid leave have returned to work.

A total of seven COVID-19 infections have been detected among asymptomatic health-care workers since the rapid testing program was launched in mid-October. Three cases were detected in Prairie Mountain Health, three in Southern Health and one in Winnipeg.

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca