Province, union working toward travel nurse program

The Nova Scotia government is working on an agreement to create a provincial travel nurse program, a move that would reduce the reliance on private companies and respond to a long-standing call by the nurses' union.

"We're hoping to get that in place sooner rather than later," Nova Scotia Nurses' Union president Janet Hazelton said in an interview on Tuesday.

Hazelton said the union and government are working on a memorandum of agreement and have been meeting every two weeks for the last couple of months to finalize the arrangement, which would see Nova Scotia Health hire nurses interested in working shorter stints at different sites across the province.

"So they'll be employees of the health authority, but they may work in Yarmouth for a bit and then go to New Glasgow," said Hazelton.

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Those nurses would still benefit from some of the draws of travel nursing, including higher wages and more time off, but they'd be employed by the province's public system and work only in this province. Hazelton said the biggest draw she hears about when speaking to Nova Scotia-based nurses who work for agencies across the country is the ability to get time off when they want it, a more predictable schedule and better work-life balance.

Like other provinces, Nova Scotia has come to increasingly rely on the use of private companies to provide nurses to fill staffing gaps across hospitals and long-term care homes.

But those services do not come cheap. The province has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on agency nurses. Last week, Finance Department officials said the Health Department is already over its travel nurse budget by $17.8 million, pushing the spending to date for this fiscal year to $97.8 million.

NDP Leader Claudia Chender is calling on the province's auditor general to look at the government's use of travel nurses.

Travel nurses fill a gap in the system, Chender said, but she said the question the government needs to answer is how to fill that gap within the public system. Like the union, the NDP has supported the call for the creation of a provincial travel nurse program.

"Right now we're fighting against ourselves and we're spending an enormous amount of money on a Band-Aid that's not going to get us toward what this government says their goal is, which is to fix health care," she said in an interview.

Liberal health critic Kelly Regan said continuity is what the system needs to best serve patients. Travel nurses that only spend a short time working on a unit or in a long-term care home do not create that necessary consistency, she said.

"If we have people who stay within the province, that is a form of continuity and that could help," she said in an interview.

Since forming government in 2021, the Progressive Conservatives have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on bonuses intended to attract and retain nurses, promised jobs to all graduates of Nova Scotia-based nursing programs, increased efforts to attract internationally educated nurses and settled a lucrative new contract.

Hazelton said these measures will all help fill staffing gaps, but she said a provincially administered travel nursing program would also be a step toward reducing the use of private companies.

Although the government has used agency nurses for several decades, Hazelton said the reliance has shifted from specific situations to now being pervasive.

"It doesn't give us anything long term. It's just in and out," she said.

"Our staff nurses do a better job at the end of the day — full stop — because they know the people, they know the province, they know Nova Scotians and that's what we need and want."

The provincial government did not make someone available for an interview for this story.

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