Lucy clearly remembers hearing a patient’s call bell go off while she was in an isolation room. “When you’re in an isolation room, you can’t just drop something and walk out,” Lucy said. “You’re in full PPE and you’re in the middle of…dealing with an acute issue.” As a nurse working in a Vancouver Island hospital, she was in the middle of yet another shift where there were too many patients and too few nurses. On this night in late January 2022, she had eight patients to manage by herself. There were just three nurses on the floor to care for about 25 patients; ideally, there’d be six. By the time she could answer the call bell, it was 15 minutes later and the patient, who had needed help getting to the bathroom, was sitting in their own faeces. “The person right away started yelling at me saying that I took too long to get there,” she said. The night only got worse from there. The patient had lost all trust in Lucy’s ability to look after them, and they’d told their family as much. While trying to attend to all the patients she had to manage by herself, Lucy also started getting phone calls from these family members, one after the other, letting her know she was a horrible nurse. “It’s so hard because you’re really trying to split yourself between all of the people that are needing you and trying to decide where to go and where to be at that time,” Lucy said. The incident is not isolated. Patients often get angry with nurses, usually when their food or bathroom needs aren’t met in a timely manner because nurses are short staffed—Lucy says it happens to her every week. After two years of caring for people at constant risk of catching a deadly virus, nurses across Vancouver Island are facing ever more harsh workplace conditions—which not only impact their own mental health but also the level of care patients receive—despite the Omicron wave starting to subside. Compounded with chronic mispayment issues and little to no concrete steps to alleviate the pressure, Island nurses are starting to speak out despite a deep fear of professional repercussions. Capital Daily regularly heard from nurses in Victoria and across the Island that they wanted to talk publicly about their deteriorating workplace conditions but couldn’t because of a deep fear of being reprimanded for it at work, or losing their jobs. So we created a Google Form where nurses could come forward and anonymously share their stories for an article. Over the course of several weeks, 10 nurses responded with written testimonies and several, like Lucy, shared their contact information so we could follow up with them. Many said they weren’t comfortable writing down their information, for fear that it could be traced back to them by their employer. None of the nurses we spoke to said they were aware of a concrete internal policy saying they would be penalized for talking publicly about their workplace experiences without first consulting their managers, but that it was more of an ingrained, cultural fear.
Wages: not enough and not on time
There has been no dearth of headlines recently about the severity of the nursing shortage in BC. The results of a BC Nurses’ Union (BCNU) survey released in January showed 68% of union members said staffing was inadequate at their workplace in the three months prior to the survey. 35% of all nurses—and 51% of ICU and emergency ward nurses—said their experiences during the pandemic made them more likely to leave the profession in the next two years. Among the nurses we spoke to, each one said they already consider leaving nursing and know many colleagues who have. Lucy thinks about finding a different profession at least three times a month. Christina knows nurses who’ve left to find tech jobs, go into marketing, and create careers in advocacy. One colleague is leaving to become a police officer—they’re both stressful jobs but the latter pays much better. The issue of higher wages has always been something the BCNU has been negotiating. Union president Aman Grewal said she can’t reveal everything they will be asking the province for because they’re entering a bargaining year, but more money does incentivize more people to go into work and relieve some of the pressure. On many shifts, one nurse is expected to manage 12 or more patients at a time. But on stat holidays, when nurses get paid overtime hours and there’s an incentive to take extra shifts, Lucy says her department is relatively well staffed. “Those days seem a little bit nicer, a little bit lighter.” Even the wages they’re supposed to get now are not always meted out correctly. Several nurses have said they find consistent errors in the amount they’re paid by Island Health, and that corrections can take up to eight months. According to Christina, these are usually cases where payment for overtime work or a missed meal break don’t show up on a nurse’s paycheque. Taylor, another nurse who works at an Island hospital, says she never used to track how much she was being paid until she began hearing stories from other nurses. Between October 2021 and March 2, she says there are still 16 shifts for which she hasn’t been paid correctly. “It’s become an extra job just to ensure we’re being paid properly, in a time when we are all already at the end of our rope,” Taylor wrote in her testimony. “I have absolutely considered leaving nursing; I do on a weekly basis.” There is potential good news on that front: In February, the BC government announced they will be adding 602 new nursing seats at post-secondary institutions across the province, to add to the 2,000 existing seats—a move the BCNU called a “promising step” but said they’ll wait for more details in the coming months. “We’ve got internationally educated nurses who are here in the province waiting for their credentialing to be done,” Grewal said, adding that she has been committed to getting the province to speed up that process for several years. The union has also advocated for access to appropriate PPE, like N95 masks, for nurses over the course of the pandemic. The work isn’t done on that front—the BCNU survey found that 36% of members say their employer has restricted access to PPE and in 73% of those cases, this means the protective gear is kept under lock and key—but Grewal says more nurses now have N95s available to them because of this advocacy.
The toll
On top of concerns for their own safety, the fact that patients don’t get proper standards of care because there aren’t enough nurses to meet their needs is something that weighs heavy on nurses’ minds. Read more at: ‘On the verge of mental and physical breakdown’: why a growing number of Victoria nurses are quitting
