Nurses protest government’s use of ‘travel nurses’ amid health care crisis

On Tuesday, nurses and supporters gathered on the steps of Confederation Building to demand the provincial government reduce its spending on private agency nurses as a stopgap measure to address the province’s nursing shortage.

“We’re here today because when health care is under attack, we fight back!” said Registered Nurses’ Union Newfoundland and Labrador President Yvette Coffey.

The nurses’ union, which represents more than 5,800 nurses and nurse practitioners in the province, is asking the auditor general to investigate the government’s spending on private travel nurses. 

The rally comes less than two weeks after a Globe and Mail investigation into the provincial government’s contract with a private, for-profit company based in Toronto and public money spent on private travel nurses. The investigation found that public spending on private nurses has drastically increased since the pandemic. Between April and August of 2023, the province spent $35.6 million on agency nurses, a considerable rise from the pre-pandemic annual average of just over $1 million. The Globe also reports that Canadian Health Labs, contracted by the Andrew Furey government, was in some cases paid the hourly wage equivalent of more than $300 per nurse, an amount exponentially higher than the average rate of pay for nurses in the province.

Acknowledging that spending on private nurses was necessary to support a health system in crisis early-on in the pandemic, Coffey said government’s reliance on private health care agencies “has just exploded.”

“Yes, we have nursing vacancies in emergency rooms throughout the province, but more often than that, it’s because of the lack of physicians, and the lack of nurse practitioners or Advanced Care Paramedics,” Coffey explained. “Government could have and should have — and needs to — invest in the people of this province, not a private agency.”

The challenges in NL

According to the union, there were 752 registered nurse vacancies in the province in October 2022, a 22 per cent increase from 615 vacancies just six months earlier in April 2022. A provincial report released in May 2023 noted there were “roughly three times the number of vacancies that the system can absorb and still operate normally.”

That report came about a year after the provincial government signed a contract with Canadian Health Labs to recruit nurses from other provinces and relocate them to understaffed health care facilities in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Today, public nurses say they’re not respected in their own health care system. According to Coffey, nurses were offered double time last summer to fill gaps in schedules, but this has since stopped. “This is still a cheaper option to fill gaps in schedules than a private agency,” she argued. 

According to the Globe, Canadian Health Labs billed governments for other expenses to private nurses including cab rides, furniture, pet transportation and even an air fryer. Meanwhile, according to Coffey, “a registered nurse in Newfoundland and Labrador does a 24-hour shift and they’re not even offered a taxi home or [a] meal.” 

“What has started as a short term solution to a problem has become more of a long term plan,” said Jeannie Reddy, community health nurse of 29 years who attended Tuesday’s rally.

Janet Beattie, a community health nurse of 25 years, agreed, saying “privatization does a disservice to our profession.”

“We have had nurses leave community health to go to travel nursing,” Reddy added, “because they get better pay.” While Reddy believes travel nurses are necessary during nurse shortages, she said she’s “against the plan to have them for the long term.” 

“If we don’t treat people here with respect and invest in them, we will lose them,” Coffey said during her speech on the steps of the legislature.

Opposition, union call for investigations

Minister of Health and Community Services Tom Osborne has called travel nurses a “necessary evil” in order to keep emergency departments and services open during the pandemic. He attended Tuesday’s rally and said he “want[s] to see an end to agency nursing as well,” adding “all provinces have to do it.

“If we have one province that does, and the other nine do not, then there’s still going to be agency nursing, and the province that puts in place a ban loses their nurses to the province that has it in place.” 

On Monday, Osborne said he is calling on the province’s Office of the Comptroller General to review the money spent on travel nurses.

Responding Tuesday at the rally, Coffey reiterated the union’s previous call and said nurses “still want the auditor general to investigate this independently.”

In a statement Tuesday, Progressive Conservative Leader Tony Wakeham called the situation “Furey’s travel nursing fiasco,” and supported the Registered Nurses’ Union’s call for an investigation to be done by the auditor general. But the PCs are also calling for the RCMP’s involvement.

“The minister is trying to get the [comptroller general], who is answerable to a minister, to investigate themselves,” Wakeham says in the statement. 

“Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system,” NDP MHA Lela Evans told the crowd Tuesday. “And right now we say the system is broken because we broke the backs of the nurses.” Evans believes the crisis is due in part to government’s lack of support for nurses. “We burnt them out, we ran them into the ground, and they’re leaving in droves.” 

The Torngat Mountains MHA said travel nurse agencies are making a profit “off the backs of our nurses,” and that the money spent on travel nurses “should have gone to improving our health care.” 

In a statement Tuesday, NDP Leader Jim Dinn challenged Osborne’s depiction of travel nurses as a necessary evil. “The workers are not the problem,” he says. “The employer is the problem.” 

Privatization not the answer

Coffey says the government needs to bolster retention and recruitment efforts to address the nursing shortage. 

In December, Nova Scotia implemented a policy to curb the use of travel nurses by limiting private agency nurses’ work terms to six months. 

“I propose that we put a cap on the number of hours allotted to agency nurses, and we start slowly decreasing the amount of time and the amount of work that they’re getting,” Coffey said Tuesday.

Reddy believes the solution starts in nursing schools. “We have to find a way to encourage [nursing students] to stay in Newfoundland,” she said. “It’s going to take some incentives to keep nurses here that are already here.”

Beattie wants the government to listen more to the nurses who are working right now. “Let’s make it so that it’s a workable industry, for working parents, for young people, people of all ages and all abilities,” she said. 

Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public and Private Employees President Jerry Earle joined the rally in support of the nurses and reiterated the creeping privatization of nursing. 

“Anywhere you look where there is a private entity involved, their number one objective is to make a profit — profit for themselves, profit for their shareholders,” he said. “And it’s not about care.

“We’ve got to remind those that we elect — past, current, and future governments: we own this health-care system. It is not a government health care system, because the people of Newfoundland and Labrador own it — and we expect them to protect it.”