(Montreal) After a night when the CIUSSS de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal asked the public to avoid the emergency room at Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont (HMR) due to a crisis with nursing staff, activities resumed in the morning. However, the crisis is not over.
The patrol of ambulances and patients resumed at Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont on Tuesday morning, after a night of reduced operations.
The day before, the nurses on the evening shift refused a contingency plan imposed by hospital management, which wanted them to work as a reduced team. This plan, in their view, put the health and safety of patients at risk.
In the idea of not obliging the day nurses to stay in the evening by doing mandatory overtime (OST), the evening nurses found themselves with an unacceptable patient/nurse ratio, according to them.
“I’m very happy that the nurses held their own because defending the quality of care is important”, indicated to The Press Pierre-David Gagné, a nurse in the operating room of the same hospital. “The conditions we wanted to impose on them were inhuman,” he said.
Nurses are responsible for the quality of care they provide, added Mr. Gagné. “When there is going to be a death, the person who is easy to denounce is the nurse, he illustrates. The person who is going to leave his shift, he will have the impression of having put lives in danger, and that is what the nurses of Maisonneuve-Rosemont have defended. »
Minister Dubé aware of the situation
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, PRESS ARCHIVES
Christian Dube
Aware of the situation, the Minister of Health Christian Dubé indicated that he would take stock on Tuesday.
“The emergency situation at HMR is currently untenable, I am aware of that,” he wrote on Twitter late Monday, after meeting with the establishment’s president and CEO, Jean-François Verreault- Fort.
“Our priority is to ensure the safety of all patients. That’s why we made the difficult decision to limit activities to the emergency room for this night. We will take stock [mardi] “, he added.
The situation at the HMR emergency room continues to make headlines. Sunday, The Press reported that a hundred emergency nurses at this hospital were threatening to leave their posts if the head of unit did not lose hers. A little earlier last week, the union also claimed that a “sad record” of TSO had been crossed in the emergency room.
“The situation is not rosy everywhere, but there are places where the situation is blood red, believes Pierre-David Gagné, and this is the case at HMR. We have to stop thinking that we can make nurses do everything we don’t want to do. »