The mystery hovers around the promise made in September by the Legault government to hire 3,000 administrative assistants in the very short term responsible for supporting nurses in the health network.
The bet seems all the more risky since we know that office work is one of the sectors most affected by the current labor shortage.
On the ground, voices are being heard to believe that, in this context, this commitment seems completely unrealistic. To date, no one has been hired yet, and the process of recruiting these assistants – the vast majority are women – has not even started.
However, the expected contribution of these 3000 assistants, to whom we would entrust various office tasks normally entrusted to nurses, including the management of “paperwork”, is at the heart of Quebec’s project to bring 4000 nurses back into the fold of the public network. The idea is to free up time for nurses to devote more time to their patients.
The project, presented by Prime Minister François Legault and Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, and described as “major”, consists of hiring “quickly” and training 3,000 people, starting this fall, to ensure that they be at work as soon as possible in hospitals.
Since then, the office of the Minister of Health has refused to provide information on this subject. For its part, the communications directorate of the ministry is content to say that the project is at the “development” stage and that it is still “too early to specify the various modalities” of this measure. The department has no documentation to provide on the recruitment process, the qualifications required or the salary offered.
In comparison, the ministry makes an update every week, to say where the repatriation program of thousands of nurses in the public network is at.
Network managers were not consulted on how to integrate these new resources into work teams, neither were the nurses, and even less the organizations that represent the administrative assistants.
Vacant positions
In the field, one wonders where Quebec will find these 3,000 people ready in the short term to make life easier for nurses. All the more so as potential recruits risk running away at full speed when faced with the prospect of having to work nights and weekends in a constantly stressed work environment.
According to the most recent calculations by the Institut du Québec, made using data from Statistics Canada, office support work is on the list of the ten jobs showing the most significant increase in the number of vacant positions in the last two years, an increase 66.4% from 2019 to 2021.
The president of the Association of managers of health and social services establishments, Chantal Marchand, wonders about the realism of the announcement. She argues that it has become a real challenge in the health network to attract and “retain” staff, whether they are managers, nurses or administrative assistants. In this last category, there are already a number of unfilled positions in hospitals. “The network has a hard time keeping its people”, deplores Mme Marchand, not to mention that Quebec has cut, in recent years, 1,500 managerial positions in the health sector.
In a telephone interview, she wonders in this context how the government will do to attract and retain these thousands of new resources, and how it will go about ensuring that the network is perceived by them as “an employer of choice”?
“You really have to want it”
Evening or weekend work schedules, “nobody is looking for that”, adds the president of the Association of administrative support personnel of Quebec, Vanessa Mongeau, who recalls in an interview that its members are usually women looking for a balance between personal and professional life.
Women who exercise this profession are spoiled for choice, so working in a hospital environment, “you really have to want it”, she said.
Mme Mongeau believes that the government’s plan, especially on schedule, is “unrealistic” because there are already vacant administrative assistant jobs “by the ton”. In this area, she describes the shortage as “extreme”. “Where are they going to find them?” “, These 3,000 assistants, she wonders, fearing that Quebec will call on private employment agencies, while it has undertaken to use them as little as possible in the case of nurses.
Even if the ultimate objective of the government measure is to attract a greater number of nurses, the federation which represents them, the FIQ, has never been informed or consulted on its relevance and its modalities.
The interim president of the FIQ, Nathalie Lévesque, qualifies the project as “very ambitious”, to the point of not being at all certain that it will become a reality. Basically, she confirms that the management of administrative tasks increases the burden on nurses and that a helping hand in this regard will be welcome. She estimates that up to about 30% of nurses’ working time may have to be spent on various clerical tasks, such as filling out forms, “a considerable waste of time.”
No one in the government wanted to estimate the cost of the measure.