Retention, not recruitment — keeping the nurses we have

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/10/2024 (421 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s heavy, hard work. It’s long hours, long days and imposed overtime.

It’s extremely rewarding — when things go well — and heartbreaking almost beyond imagining when, despite best efforts, everything falls short. It’s heavy patient loads, to the point that every shift, someone’s getting short-changed in one way or another.

And the stakes are high.

Because people die. Because people don’t get the kind of care they deserve in the health-care system, and nurses are on the front lines.

So perhaps we should be looking at the canary in the coal mine, and asking ourselves what’s coming next.

The talk about improving health care always centres around more — recruiting more doctors, finding more nurses, bringing more paramedics into the ranks.

But maybe we should be talking about, oddly, less.

Or, to be correct, fewer.

And nurses are a good example. A recent study by the Montreal Economic Institute found that slightly under 30 per cent of nurses entering our health-care system leave by the time they reach 35.

That’s a staggering turnover.

Anyone in business can tell you that successful staff retention pays for itself — you don’t have to invest time and money in hunting for new staff, you don’t have the inevitable costs and time of training those new employees on your systems and policies. You don’t have the period of time it takes for them to reach their full stride in a new and unfamiliar working environment. You don’t have to take people fresh out of the education system and help them through the transition to full-time employment.

But imagine if you, as an employer, were having to do that on a full-time basis, bringing in new employees to replace close to 30 per cent turnover by the time your employees reached the age of 35.

There are industries that do that — the hospitality and tourism industry comes to mind — but many of the high-turnover jobs don’t need years of involved training.

Right now, Health Canada is forecasting that there will be a shortage of 117,000 nurses by 2030, and that means the focus should be on keeping every single nurse — and other medical professional, for that matter — that we possibly can.

Retaining nurses will be even more important as the available pool of nurses disappears.

Manitoba may be doing well in comparison to other provinces, where even higher percentages of nurses are fleeing the profession before they reach 35, but that’s no excuse to sit back and think we’ll be able to buy our way out of the problem with an endless supply of new hires. Because the supply is drying up.

Instead, our health-care system should be focusing on supporting and mentoring the nurses we do have, and finding meaningful ways to address their concerns about work-life balance.

When nurses are interviewed about leaving the public system and going into private health-care companies, one of the main reasons they give is that they’re able to control when they are working. In the perpetually stretched public system, administrators — already dealing with short-staffing — are making it impossible for nurses to have that control, and are in the process making the problem even worse.

Of the two r-words — recruitment and retention— from Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara on down, the focus must turn to retention.

Every effort should be made to try and keep the medical professionals we have, instead of riding a merry-go-round of new nurses, followed by stressed, exhausted nurses willing to give up their profession.

There isn’t an endless supply of nurses — and it’s a horrific waste of their skills, training and knowledge to have them leave so soon.