The health network was cracking everywhere, on the 1er December, when Minister Christian Dubé issued a desperate appeal to retired nurses in Quebec: please come and lend a hand. With overflowing emergencies, we are not providing. We need 5,000 nurses to unclog 811 calls.
As luck would have it, on the same day, a nurse at the CHSLD Chevalier-De Lévis in Longueuil received a letter from her employer, the CISSS de la Montérégie-Est. It was a disciplinary notice.
The act reproached to the rascal was detailed in all its villainy in the second paragraph: “On October 2, around 9:30 a.m., you prepared a toast with peanut butter and you ate it. »
For this misdemeanor, what am I saying, this very serious crime, the nurse was given a three-day suspension without pay.
This story unveiled Friday by the Montreal Journal caused… disbelief.
It seemed impossible, as the sanction was disproportionate. It was absurd. Something must have escaped us. We lacked context. Surely we didn’t know everything…
Even Minister Dubé was skeptical Monday morning. “It’s such a big decision that I don’t understand it,” he confessed at the microphone of Paul Arcand, at 98.5 FM. Cautious, the Minister reserved his comments, pending explanations from the CISSS.
Verification done… we didn’t lack any context. Not the slightest nuance that could have made us better understand the managers’ decision. This story was just nonsense. Completely absurd.
All the same, the media had to get involved to push back these bureaucrats. On Monday, the Minister for Health and Seniors, Sonia Bélanger, asked the CEO of the CISSS, Bruno Petrucci, for an explanation. At the end of the afternoon, the sanction was canceled and the nurse received an apology.
But back to the famous context. It is described in the suspension letter of 1er december. That morning, the nurse hadn’t had time for breakfast. She was hungry, to the point of having a stomach ache. So she made herself a peanut butter toast, not knowing it was forbidden.
That’s all. Finally, it should have been.
“We therefore conclude that it is without right that you have appropriated property of the establishment for residents,” reads the delusional letter of suspension. “This gesture constitutes theft […]. This is a serious breach of your obligations of loyalty and honesty. »
In the event of a repeat offence, we still read, “we will have no other choice but to take more severe measures, which may go as far as dismissal”.
And it goes on like this for two pages. Prefabricated sentences, straight out of the perfect manual of technocrats, like: “Your shortcomings have significant negative consequences both on the reputation of the establishment and on your professional credibility. »
Tarnish the reputation of the establishment? With hindsight, we see how much this remonstrance applies less to the nurse than to those who scribbled it…
“The managers involved will be met,” we are promised at Minister Bélanger’s office. Let’s bet they’ll get away with it with a slap on the wrist. After all, they were just following the rules to the letter, like any technocrat would. Without worrying for a second about the context, quite silly, quite simple: an employee who hadn’t had time to have lunch.
These managers have not bothered to concern themselves with the larger context either: a health network that is once again threatening to collapse. A serious lack of staff.
Elderly people terrified at the idea of going to live in a CHSLD. Institutions put under guardianship because of negligence towards the residents. Exhausted nurses, forced to work mandatory overtime, who drop out or move into the private sector. A government that goes out of its way to keep them in the network.
Like it or not, that’s the general context.
Minister Christian Dubé does not like painting such a gloomy picture of the network he has promised to transform, for the better of course. “It is by building on our successes and what is going well that we will get there,” he wrote on Facebook on Sunday. It is not by pointing out what is wrong that we are going to make our network attractive. »
OK. We can make an effort and also talk about the good moves. We just need the network to help us a little.
This text has been modified to specify that Minister Sonia Bélanger has asked the CEO of the CISSS, Bruno Petrucci, for an explanation. An earlier version erroneously stated that a meeting with took place between the two.