Nurses voting with their feet

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This article was published 30/04/2024 (549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Changing jobs is rarely easy.

Even a bad job — an unfulfilling, unsatisfying, exhausting job — can be hard to leave, because it’s the proverbial bird in the hand.

You know the expectations, you know the pay, you know your spot in the corporate firmament.

And there’s always the chance that what you’re going to will be even worse, not to mention the fact that there will be new routines to learn and new people to meet — and report to.

Leaving a union-protected job where you have an established level of seniority, a good pension plan and benefits is even harder.

But people do it. Often, it’s about quality of life, and as part of that, quality of work.

Scores of nurses and other health-care workers have taken that step, moving into working for agency nursing firms, who place privately paid nurses in private sector and public sector positions, filling positions that can’t be filled otherwise.

But there’s something important that should not be forgotten here. As health agencies try to lure the more-expensive agency nurse back into the public system on a full-time basis, we have to realize that it’s not the agency nurses who built this sinking ship.

The private agency health-care worker situation was built by the public health system abusing the control it had over workers — particularly because workers didn’t have much in the way of options. Public health care was fundamentally a monopoly — it was where the interesting and challenging work was. But that virtual monopoly led to employee abuse — nurses held endlessly as call-in employees rather than getting full-time positions, double-shifting, mandatory overtime, a shortage of necessary resources, and the list goes on.

Faced with funding shortages, governments and their health care-organizations were flexing their respective fiscal muscles, and essentially wringing concessions from individual health-care employees anywhere they could.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and that vacuum of options for health-care workers outside the public system created a private sector opportunity that has turned the tables. Agency nurses are paid more, have travel costs that have to be met, and don’t have to be flexible. And then there’s the profit that agencies get as well.

As a former psychiatric nurse, the health minister understands the position of nurses who choose agency work.

“I can recall having plans with a sibling or with family and at the last minute having to change those plans or missing out — I know the impacts of your life being disrupted in that way,” Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara told the Free Press.

Now, the need for health-care workers has become so grave that the power in the equation shifted to the individual workers and their private-sector employers.

Agency nursing is now an addiction so large that health-care systems can’t give it up — they have no backstop in the public system to enable the system to run without agency health staff.

That genie is not easy to put back into the bottle because, in the end… well, go back to the top of this editorial.

Changing jobs is not easy, even when you don’t like the job you have.

But what is going to lure you to that new job if, now working for an agency, you’re paid more than your old job, treated better, and just plain like the new job more?

How much will it take to lure you back into the public fold?

We can answer that.

If anything can, it’s going to be remarkably expensive, and it will have to come with a parade of guarantees for those returning workers.

Someone else is in the driver’s seat now.