Like many health-care workers in Ontario, the nurse practitioners (NPs) and registered nurses (RNs) at Grand River Community Health Centre (CHC) aren’t paid what they deserve, and they are looking to change it.
Community health nurses like the ones at Grand River CHC provide ongoing, complex, immediate and preventative primary care to more than 5,000 people in the Brantford area. In this rapidly growing community, each NP has a roster of about 600 patients from all walks of life, including some of the most under-served populations, such as unhoused people, who are often overlooked by our health-care system.
As ONA members know well, when everyone in the community has access to quality and timely primary care, our communities flourish. We need employers and governments to invest in that, but right now it’s not happening.
Grand River CHC Bargaining Unit President Chris Savard explains:
“We’re seeing colleagues quit and morale is quite low. At Grand River CHC, we have patients who aren’t going to be able to have a provider because we’re two nurse practitioners short. It’s quite hard being a nurse practitioner or RN in the community sector because the cost of living has gone up so much and wages haven’t kept up. It's unfortunate and it’s bad for patients. If I were a nurse practitioner in a hospital, I’d be making $10 more an hour. NPs I talk to feel very devalued right now. The government just keeps asking us to do more and more for less.”
Like many health-care professionals in Ontario, Grand River CHC nurses have their families and the rising cost of living to consider in addition to thinking about their clients. With many staff leaving the sector to earn as much as 25 per cent more, many community health nurses are asking: If you’re doing the same job, why stay in one place knowing you’re paid less?
“Ontario is one of the most poorly compensated provinces for nurses and nurse practitioners in Canada,” says Savard. “If I were to move to BC, for example, I would make $40,000 more per year. And it’s not like that’s compensation for a higher cost of living. Housing is just as expensive here as in Vancouver now.”
Whether you’re a nurse in the hospital or nurse practitioner in the community, we all take pleasure in seeing people get better. We want to help people.
CHCs are $2 billion behind on wages compared to other sectors that do similar work, and they struggle to recruit and retain NPs and RNs because they don’t provide fair and competitive wages. A staggering majority of community health organizations – 94 per cent – identified compensation issues as the primary barrier to staff recruitment and retention. While they continue to underpay their nurses, RNs and NPs are leaving in droves and clients are left with nothing.
“It's funny how history repeats itself,” says Savard. “When I graduated, there weren’t a lot of job openings to be a nurse practitioner. At the time, the government funded CHCs more, which meant they were able to hire and pay NPs appropriately. It’s no surprise that when the funding was there, the people were there to work; and now that the funding is gone, there’s a struggle for it again.
“In family health teams, for example, there are very high NP vacancy rates, and what’s fascinating to me, as a community health NP and a teacher at McMaster University’s nurse practitioner program, is that this is the first time in the history of Grand River CHC that when we post a job, we’ve had nobody apply. That’s telling.”
Many NPs and RNs leave to work in hospitals where wages are higher, but this can backfire on all of us. Without them, our most marginalized community members will not get the care they need, delaying care and leading to longer wait times in hospitals and more complex care needs.
“If we had a primary care provider for everybody in Ontario, the workload in hospitals would be less, especially in emergency departments, which are exploding in demand,” says Savard. “Emergency departments were not designed to provide the kind of chronic care they’re providing. There is so much research to show that when you have access to primary care, which can be led by NPs, you’re less likely to die or go to the emergency department for things that aren’t actually emergencies. Whether you’re a nurse in the hospital or nurse practitioner in the community, we all take pleasure in seeing people get better. We want to help people.”
Two and a half million people in Ontario are without a NP or physician, while 5,100 NPs are ready, willing and able to support patients. So why isn’t the government connecting them?
Our goal is to provide a unified voice in the sector.
The Ford government must fund primary care if we want our communities to get the quality and timely care they deserve.
“There’s no logic to what we’re doing, and that’s part of what is so frustrating,” says Savard. “The system is just so fragmented and chaotic. The government keeps creating band-aid solutions, but people still get sick and then misuse health-care outlets because that’s all that is available to them, which ends up costing the government so much more money than just properly funding primary care.”
ONA recently held its first primary care connect for members from CHCs, family health teams and NP-led clinics to talk about the issues facing the sector and how we can advocate for better funding to retain and recruit workers.
Meanwhile, Grand River CHC is moving ahead to advocate for change.
“We’re organizing and holding information pickets like the one we did in Brantford in January. Our goal is to provide a unified voice in the sector,” notes Savard.
Join Grand River CHC in calling on the government to:
“I know hospital nurses feel the same,” concludes Savard. “Everybody just wants a system that provides our clients with the care they need.”
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