Recent staffing changes at Ross Memorial Hospital have created unsafe conditions for workers and patients, say health care workers represented by CUPE who held a rally outside the facility on Thursday morning.
Heather Nugent, a registered practical nurse and president of CUPE 1909, says understaffing has worsened over the last few weeks since the hospital decided to cut back on staffing hours due to lack of government funding.
“We need appropriate staffing levels that allow health care workers to provide quality care to our patients,” she says. “We are frequently witnessing an upsurge in the number of patients without appropriate staffing, which increases risk of injuries for staff and makes it impossible to meet people’s needs. The provincial government must step up and ensure our hospital is properly funded.”
Nugent says departments across the hospital were insufficiently staffed even before recent changes, which have compounded heavy workloads and stress. She says staff in nursing, pharmacy, kitchen and MDRD are among those affected.
In the case of nursing, Nugent gave an example of the complex care unit where nurse-to-patient ratios can go as high as 1 to 10 when ideally a nurse should not be assigned more than six patients.
Nugent says the government should pay attention to long wait-times in the emergency department, which are often cited as the canary in the coal mine as they serve a warning sign for overall hospital performance.
Latest provincial data shows that only 32 per cent of patients at Ross Memorial are admitted within the eight-hour target time, while on average patients have to endure 15.3 hours in the ED before admission.
Michael Hurley, president of the union’s Ontario Council of Hospitals (OCHU-CUPE), says the provincial government is implementing real dollar funding cuts to hospitals this year, which has led to more than 2,000 staffing cuts across Ontario.
“The provincial government must end this pattern of underfunding vital services that people desperately need,” says Michael Hurley, president of Ontario Council of Hospitals (OCHU-CUPE), which represents 46,000 CUPE health care workers including the staff at Ross Memorial. “By every indicator, the Lindsay hospital needs more resources to provide a decent quality of health services to the people in this community. The abdication of responsibility by the government has serious consequences for patients who rely on these services.”
