People who work on the front lines of nursing home care in New Brunswick are raising red flags over the government’s plan to add more than 1,000 nursing home beds and dementia care beds over the next five years.

Premier Brian Gallant’s plan is aimed at tackling one of New Brunswick’s biggest challenges – a rapidly aging population. In addition to the beds, the government also plans to build 10 new nursing homes.

Nursing home staff say the government’s plan looks good on paper, but until recruitment and retention strategies are put in place, the sector will continue to crumble because of a lack of workers. They say finding skilled workers is already a challenge, especially in rural areas.

“When you think about expansion of beds in the province, you can’t think about that without also coming up with a workforce development plan as well,” says Jodi Hall, executive director of the New Brunswick Nursing Home Association.

Gallant acknowledges that finding workers may be a challenge, but he says it’s one the province is happy to take on.

“It’s a better challenge than we’ve faced in the past,” says Gallant. “Often in New Brunswick we were talking about there were no jobs for New Brunswickers. Right now we’re talking about the fact that there are going to be jobs and we have to find people to fill them.”

Roughly 6,500 people work in nursing homes across the province. With a large number of those workers set to retire in the next few years, the opposition says the province needs to act now.

“We’re seeing also, the government is imposing reductions in the number of professional staff in the nursing homes, so fewer registered nurses and fewer licensed practical nurses and more personal care workers, and so we’re seeing that flipped on its head,” says New Brunswick Green Party Leader David Coon.

Coon says significant changes have been made to the amount of funding for non-profit nursing homes, causing more of a strain on existing staff.

“They are just presented with a budget in August, four months after the fiscal year begins, and they say, ‘Here’s your budget, live within it, and if you’ve gone over some of that in the last four months, then you’re going to have to cut back,’” says Coon. “You can’t work that way.”

Before the province starts to create more beds, Hall says it first needs to examine why there are so many vacant ones.

“We don’t understand all the reasons why this is occurring,” says Hall. “We don’t know if it’s a policy barrier, we don’t know if there is a reason why individuals don’t want to go to those facilities.”

The New Brunswick Nursing Home Association says it is working on new approaches to expand the workforce to ensure seniors receive the best possible care.

One of the association’s approaches is working with the Department of Education to introduce more nursing co-op programs in high schools, while promoting what it says are the positive aspects of the career, as opposed to the challenges.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Mary Cranston