Hundreds of N.B. health-care workers have quit since 2021, networks reveal at committee meeting

The CEOS and trustees of the Horizon and Vitalité health networks were in the hot seat during a public accounts committee meeting Thursday at the New Brunswick legislature.

The province’s health-care system has been thrust into the spotlight over the summer, with stories of long wait times, emergency department closures, staffing shortages, and this week, the report of an alleged sexual assault victim being asked to wait until the next day for a rape kit.

That case dominated much of the questions and discussion during the committee meeting, with both health networks promising some improvements.

CTV News has not spoken with the victim, but Horizon and police confirmed that on Aug. 1, a woman sought a sexual assault forensic examination at the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital in Fredericton.

Horizon CEO Margaret Melanson confirmed the woman was told to wait until morning because there wasn’t a trained nurse available to do the examination.

Melanson says she has since spoken to the woman.

“As a woman and as a member of the community, I assured her that this is something that's being taken very, very seriously by Horizon,” Melanson told reporters Thursday. “That we have introduced now, a very clear process improvement that will be occurring within this entire program.”

There are 26 trained nurses who can perform the exams across Horizon’s five regional hospitals. Melanson said those nurses take the training and do the exams as an added responsibility to their full-time commitments.

That’s in despite of the fact that the demand for the exam is quite high.

“There are well over 300 instances annually where this takes place. In the Fredericton area alone, since the beginning of April, there have been 63 sexual assault nurse examinations conducted,” Melanson told the committee.

Some have been speaking out on social media, saying the blame for what happened at the Fredericton ER that evening is being unfairly placed on nurses.

Melanson said staff is not to blame -- and she told Premier Blaine Higgs that when they met with him Wednesday.

“We did have a meeting with the premier, we covered a number of different issues, and certainly the premier and others are aware that there were system issues that were behind this particular circumstance,” she said.

Vitalité CEO Dr. France Desrosiers told the committee that, across nine hospitals, it has 14 trained SANE nurses, but that those nurses are on call 24/7 and they will travel to wherever the victim is located. Horizon is committing to that too.

“Fourteen right now is doing the work, they're doing the work. We need to make sure that we try to improve that service and by trying to improve the service that means we need to increase the numbers as much as we can,” said Gérald Richard, trustee of Vitalité.

He said the hope is to train six more.

The number of nurses trained as examiners used to be higher, but administrators weren’t certain if the pandemic delayed some training, which has led to fewer who have the training.

STAFF LOSSES, ER IMPROVEMENTS HIGHLIGHTED

Vitalité also revealed that, within the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the health network lost 499 health-care workers. Their average age was 37.

Of those, 152 were nurses. Their average age was 34.

Desrosiers said the majority left because of heavy workloads and low morale.

At Horizon, more than 600 health-care workers have left the health authority since April 1.

Those include 390 resignations, which include workers who decided to leave for a number of reasons other than retirements. Of those, 188 are registered nurses.

Melanson says they are implementing actions to help with the pressures facing emergency departments.

Over the summer, the death of a patient in the waiting room of the Chalmers’ emergency department prompted calls for major improvements, specifically in emergency departments. There has also been plenty of criticism and reports of staffing shortages, burnout, and extremely long wait times for patients.

In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, there were 270,113 visits to emergency rooms across Horizon hospitals.

That’s up about three per cent from the 2020-2021 fiscal year, when 262,335 visits were made.

Melanson called it a “system issue” and says a reduction in staffing has “definitely contributed to these patient flow issues.”

She said Thursday they’re looking into a number of initiatives to lessen the workload on nursing staff and working with a local company to improve processing of patients.

“Our nursing staff are burdened by our overall patient flow issues within our regional facilities, so one of the main issues they face are numbers of patients within our emergency departments who are admitted and needing to be transferred to inpatient care,” Melanson said.

“We have recruited successfully a new executive director, predominately devoted to work within the emergency departments, as well as a new medical director who will be announced hopefully before the end of this month. We have been working on the introduction of other types of allied health professionals within the emergency department to alleviate the burden on registered nurses for tasks and services that they may not necessarily need to perform.”

Since April, Horizon has hired 1,403 health-care professionals, including 270 registered nurses and 179 licensed practical nurses.