Ontario health minister addresses staff shortages, looks to accredit more international nurses

Ontario is looking at how to get more internationally trained nurses working in the province in order to ease staffing shortages that have led to temporary emergency room closures, the health minister said Tuesday, but she didn’t indicate that she’s planning to address nurses’ compensation.

Sylvia Jones told The Canadian Press in an interview that the ministry, the health system bureaucracy and hospitals do “everything possible” to try to get shifts covered so emergency departments can operate, but closures still happen at times.

Plans to avoid those situations in the first place include hiring more health-care workers, she said.

“The plan is what we have, frankly, been doing for the last four years, (putting) historic investments into making sure that we have sufficient health-care workers to cover those shifts,” Jones said.

Jones touted more than 10,000 healthcare workers added since the start of the pandemic. That includes 7,000 nurses and 2,400 personal support workers, a spokesman said.

The government will introduce “additional measures” to boost capacity, she said, specifically mentioning a backlog of internationally trained health workers waiting for certifications.

“We do know that there is a backlog of individuals waiting for those certifications,” she said. “How can we assist, as a province, to make sure that whatever upgrades are needed or whatever assessments happen can happen in an expedited manner.?”

Nursing groups, hospital executives and other healthcare professionals and advocates have said that burnout after being on the COVID-19 front lines for more than two years and not being properly compensated have caused people to leave the profession in droves, leading to some hospitals being unable to properly staff emergency departments.

Staff on the front line tell CityNews COVID-19 has stressed cracks in the foundation of a system that was already on the verge of collapse.

Nurses have called for wage restraint legislation known as Bill 124 to be repealed, but Jones says, “that is a conversation for another day.”

Ontario’s opposition parties have criticized Jones for not holding a news conference to publicly address the staffing crisis, but she says her role in the last number of weeks has been to meet with organizations and individuals in the sector who have solutions and listening to their feedback.

It comes as 14 Ontario hospitals were forced to close their emergency rooms, beds or intensive care units this long weekend.

The latest figures and data from Health Quality Ontario, an agency created by the government to connect and coordinate the healthcare system to ensure Ontarians receive the best possible care, showed that in May patients waited an average of 2.1 hours for a first assessment by an ER doctor.

With files from Lucas Casaletto and Caryn Ceolin