It will have been necessary for the Presto to jump so that we finally take the bull by the horns at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital.
An outside facilitator to help managers and union find a lasting solution to the staffing crisis that has plagued the ER for months. We wish him the best of luck.
But the question remains: why did we come here?
Union Showdown
Things were bound to pick up in October 2021, just as a new collective agreement was signed.
“I’m confident that everything is there to stabilize the network,” said Minister Christian Dubé hopefully. Even the end of forced overtime was under discussion, a breath of fresh air that should make the nursing profession more attractive.
It’s wrong!
Admittedly, the crisis team is beginning to bear fruit, the number of emergency rooms is falling, and access to care for orphan patients is improving. In Maisonneuve-Rosemont, too, the average length of time spent on a stretcher has decreased significantly.
These are all breakthroughs that show certain aspects of our health mammoth can be overhauled, tweaked and modernized.
Still, in terms of industrial relations, the finding is heartbreaking.
Make no mistake, the new arm-wrestling that is taking shape in the face of the new round of negotiations is helping to heat up tempers and radicalize positions.
But we say it politely. “Nurses work more than they want to,” says the manager of the CIUSSS de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal embarrassed.
Because beyond the difficult working conditions, in an emergency, at night, in a run-down hospital, one can wonder why working 35 hours a week, including overtime, justifies us forcing emergency operations.
Nice example
The question arises: What will the next break in service be? Where from ?
Lakeshore Hospital has already had a sit-in. The shortage of staff is so great that the newspaper Métro told us yesterday that an internal evaluation had classified the situation as a “ticking time bomb”. »
The reasons ? The same vicious circle as elsewhere: lack of resources, unfilled full-time positions, workload. History does not say whether the average working time in the emergency room is around 35 hours.
And what about the Saint-Jérôme hospital? The emergency is so underutilized that the president of the medical board mentioned the psychological distress of nurses facing their patients in chairs in the hallways?
Would you like us to talk about Anna-Laberge in Châteauguay? By Pierre Boucher?
In each of these hospitals, where the working atmosphere has been poisoned either by union militancy or by psycho-rigid managers, or where promises of renovation have been postponed again and again, the example is set: going to the barricades brings results.
At this rate, the healthcare network is in such a sorry state that there are no shortage of excuses to hold patients hostage.
