If the healthcare staff were a patient, they would be in critical condition. The population seems to have understood this.
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
A national survey by the University of Ottawa, conducted March 4-8, 2022 among members of the Angus Reid Forum, paints a disturbing picture of our feelings about health care workers. Nine in ten (87%) say they worry about the mental health of healthcare workers.
This level of concern even exceeds that of Canadians about their own mental and physical health. When asked what has changed since March 2020, 54% say their mental health has deteriorated.
After two years of pandemic stress, we are therefore much more likely to express concern about the mental health of healthcare workers than to say that our own health has deteriorated.
People don’t just care about health care workers; they are also concerned about the impact on their access to health services and on the quality of care. Four out of five people (79%) say they fear for their access to health services because of the shortage of personnel in this sector. And a slightly higher number of respondents (84%) say they are worried about the quality of healthcare.
Women are significantly more likely than men to express concern about the mental health of health care workers, access to health services and quality of care. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the health workforce is made up mainly of women. Indeed, more than three-quarters of health care workers identify as female, and this proportion is increasing every year.
Regionally, half of those surveyed in Atlantic Canada (53%) strongly agree that they are concerned about their access to health services due to staffing shortages, representing the highest rate, by far, in the country. This is possibly due to the prominence of the issue of health care during the provincial elections in this region.
On to the politicians
If the population understands the situation, it does not seem to be the case for politicians. In the recent federal budget, there was nothing about these growing concerns.
During the pandemic, health and safety concerns and unsustainable workloads have led to a dramatic increase in burnout and other mental health issues, which were already prevalent among nurses and doctors before. . Health workers have had to contend with 16+ hour workdays, vacation cancellations and forced reassignments.
And that is without counting the violence.
Already, before the pandemic, we were warned that nurses were facing increasing violence due to understaffing, inadequate safety measures and increasing patient numbers, and that even women in medicine were victims of incivility, intimidation and harassment.
In its 2019 report, “Violence Experienced by Health Care Workers in Canada”1, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health noted that health care workers are four times more likely to experience workplace violence than those in other professions. Yet most cases of violence go unreported due to the culture of acceptance of violence.
Only a few of the important recommendations of this report have been implemented. We are still waiting for the awareness campaign on violence experienced by health care workers and the pan-Canadian violence prevention framework. The same is true for the essential update of the Pan-Canadian Health Human Resources Strategy, which must help to address labor shortages and reflect the well-being of health professionals.
While health care workers look after us, the government is failing to provide them with the support and care they need through supportive public policies.
As stated by more than 65 healthcare organizations and 300 industry experts and leaders in an advocacy petition launched last year, it’s time for the federal government to take the lead in supporting provinces, territories, regions, hospitals , health authorities and training program managers by investing in improved health workforce data and decision-making tools.
Canada needs to make informed staffing decisions, optimize the contribution of the available workforce and improve workplace safety. Right now we’re making blind decisions.
The case for investing in supporting healthcare workers is both economic – the healthcare workforce accounts for 8% of Canada’s GDP, or more than $175 billion in 2019 – and humans.
We must come to the obvious. The status quo is the most expensive and least defensible solution in the future.