Nurses Talk Truth: “We aren’t pushovers”

Take Annie Parry, for example, an RN for 47 years, who came out of retirement to work in long-term care (LTC) after a career in hospitals, home care, public health programming, remote nursing in the Yukon and a decade in California. She saw us filming our Care, not profit LTC campaign ads in an out-of-the-way corner outside our Provincial Leadership Meeting last year and immediately stopped to ask if she could be involved. 

Turns out she has a lot to say about the state of our health-care system. So much so, in fact, that she featured prominently in that campaign, which coincided with our most recent round of nursing homes provincial bargaining, and the following eight ads we launched in January for a short and intensive social media run in anticipation of an early provincial election call. 

The most recent flight of black and white ads featured 14 ONA members (some ads highlighted more than one), including Parry, sharing unscripted and stark realities of their work and the negative impacts of the Ford government’s policies. The takeaway message? Ontario deserves better. 

“I would love to meet with Doug Ford and tell him to his face what I think of his health care,” Parry says. “It infuriates me. How dare he dismantle a health-care system that I used to be very proud of. I fret all the time about what I’m able to do with my nursing skills versus what constraints allow me to do. Nurses don’t have the time or the resources to do what they see needs to be done.”

Despite the short run for our pre-election ads, they wracked up an impressive number of views (912,000 on Facebook/Instagram and 1.81 million on YouTube). Our monthly ad was also prominently placed in Hospital News magazine, along with full-page ads in the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail in the lead-up to election day. (ONA was bound by legislation that limits third-party spending prior to and during a provincial election campaign, part of which has since been overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada for violating the constitutional right to vote.)

For Parry, who has done a lot of mentoring in her career, being involved in the ads was a way to help fight back against a health-care system that has drastically deteriorated since she decided to become a nurse for very selfless reasons. 

“Back in the day [1973], the options for post-secondary education for a woman were fairly limited. While I was accepted to university, my parents couldn’t afford to send me, and there was a belief back then that it was just wasting money because you were going to get married and have children anyway. So, I waited until I was a mature student working in a bank. I enrolled in a hospital-based nursing program, which was almost free, and felt validated and encouraged to become an RN. Having direct patient interactions where my nursing was able to make a difference to someone, and/or being a witness to someone’s difficult life experiences has all been a gift to me.” 

But today, that comes with a lot of challenges. 

While our Nurses Talk Truth ads vary according to the sector or topic we are targeting, there are common themes: the dire nursing shortage, staffing issues, lack of government health-care funding, and creeping privatization, which funnels public taxpayer dollars to Ford’s already rich buddies, who want to turn a profit. Nowhere is that more evident than in the uptake of private surgeries (shoulder surgeries at private, for-profit clinics, for example, charge four times more than public hospitals) and the use of agency nurses. 

In fact, Parry shared that as a Bargaining Unit President, she has heard from ONA nurses in many health-care settings that it is widely believed agency nurses generally receive less policy orientation and are therefore intrinsically unable to provide proper continuity of care. In addition, regular staff need to spend a lot of time getting them up to speed on day-to-day operations – all of which takes time away from patient care.

“When I came back from the States 10 years ago, the signs of privatization were everywhere,” Parry states. “You want a wart removed? Unless it’s life threatening, you have to pay for it yourself. A lot of immunizations and dermatology services you have to pay for. And I’m like, what? When did you have to start paying for physical therapy? 

“People don’t realize how much it costs even to be in a long-term care bed. If an ambulance takes a resident to hospital, they or their family have to pay for the ambulance costs. That to me is outrageous. By privatizing health-care services, Doug Ford is really putting more money in the pockets of corporations while reducing or taking away services that provide basic levels of care and support for Ontarians.” 

Still, Parry, who retired again at the end of January and is now part of ONA’s Retiree Network, is positive about the future of nursing – as long as we all come together.

“Nurses advocating for better health care is exciting because we aren’t frail pushovers,” she explains. “If nurses can put up with the challenges that they face every day, then expect them to stand up for what they believe in. While I wouldn’t have been so outspoken 40 years ago, it’s a gift of my nursing career that I can now speak my mind to try to prevent destruction in our health-care system. I know not everybody is comfortable speaking up; many nurses are afraid of repercussions and employer retaliation. But never forget that nurses advocate and care for patients, residents and clients, and we need to reinforce this to anyone who wants to destroy our public health-care system. There is unity in that. And we all have ONA, which has been a tremendous support right from the beginning.”