Demoralized, exhausted and frustrated, health care workers protested outside Lakeridge hospital in Oshawa today in response to chaotic working conditions amid provincial funding restraint.
Pam Parks, a registered practical nurse and president of CUPE 6364, which represents about 3,500 workers at three Lakeridge Health sites, said that the hospital has eliminated more than 40 jobs over the past year, even as patient volumes are rising with a corresponding increase in workloads.
“Staff are fed up with the chaotic conditions at Lakeridge. We have stretchers full of patients in the hallway, because our hospital is running over capacity. Staff are overrun because there is more work but less staff. But because of a capacity shortage, there is pressure to discharge the patients quickly – even as they actually need more hands-on care and time to recover. And yet, the hospital management wants to implement more cuts,” she said.
The hospital has been cutting jobs and reassigning work in a bid to save money due to insufficient funding from the government, Parks said.
In March, management told the union that nurses would have to take on the additional responsibility to serve food to patients as it was eliminating three full-time dietary aide workers.
Parks said that registered practical nurses were appalled because they are already stretched thin, taking care of not just their regular patients but also those on stretchers in the hallway.
“We need appropriate nurse-to-patient ratios, which are critical to saving patients’ lives, improving their overall well-being, and preventing staff burnout,” she said. “But the hospital is constantly going backward by piling on more work on us, because there isn’t enough money to pay for safe staffing at Lakeridge.”
Michael Hurley, president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, OCHU-CUPE, said that government funding cuts have led to hundreds of layoffs across the hospital sector in the past six months, even as an ageing and growing population requires additional staffing and capacity.
“The provincial statistics tell the story very clearly – only 20% of ER patients at Lakeridge are admitted within the eight-hour target time. The average patient waits an excruciating 22.9 hours. That is unacceptable – at the least the provincial government has an obligation to meet its own standards. The people of Oshawa deserve better,” he said.
