The Montfort Hospital — the only French-speaking university hospital in Ontario — located in Ottawa, will use placement agencies to make up for its shortage of nurses for the first time in about a decade. According to the hospital centre, there are nearly 220 positions for registered nurses and bilingual licensed practical nurses, full-time and part-time, permanent and temporary, which are vacant.
Employment of nurses from agencies is rare at Montfort. The last wave of agency use dates back to around 2010, when the French-language hospital, which now has nearly 3,000 employees, doubled the number of beds as part of the “Nouveau Montfort” expansion project. . The establishment can usually take advantage of its status as a teaching hospital to recruit new nurses. “Historically, we hadn’t often used agencies,” said spokesperson Geneviève Picard.
The hospital is short about 160 registered nurses and 60 licensed practical nurses. These are not exclusively full-time positions, however; there is therefore no shortage of the equivalent of 220 nurses every day at the hospital, specifies Geneviève Picard. Montfort is not looking for a specific agreement with the agencies since the needs are diverse. Nor does the hospital center close the door to Quebec agencies, provided that their staff can practice nursing in Ontario.
The shortage of nurses at Montfort this year has already had an impact on the service offer. On August 6 and 7, the hospital had to close its emergency department overnight due to an unprecedented shortage of staff. “The human resources challenges we are currently facing are not unique to Montfort, but our particular character makes the situation very complex, since our staff must be qualified and bilingual,” the hospital wrote in the days that followed.
Not a problem unique to Ottawa
Montfort is not the only Ottawa hospital to have to manage a staff shortage. More than 1,000 nursing positions are to be filled in hospitals in the region. At The Ottawa Hospital, which has three sites, 700 nursing positions are vacant, and at the Queensway Carleton Hospital, 152. “It’s very difficult to hire nurses, especially in specialty areas” , explains the spokesperson for the hospital center, Ann Fuller. Current vacancies are down from the start of the year, when 194 jobs went unfilled.
At the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, 124 positions are vacant. Bruyère, which has two hospital sites in Ottawa, has 177 vacant nursing positions. According to Statistics Canada’s July 2022 Labor Force Survey, nursing vacancies have more than tripled in the past five years.
A “last resort” option
“The 2022 nursing shortage is definitely a crisis,” said Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, in the report. Supporting Nursing in Canada, published on November 17. The research dossier was written by two experts from the University of Ottawa at the request of the federation. It documents the extent of the challenges of retaining and recruiting nurses in the country and suggests possible solutions.
According to University of Ottawa professor Houssem Eddine Ben Ahmed, one of the two authors of the report, public hospitals should offer better working conditions to their employees if they want to retain or recruit them. Universities could also admit more nursing students to meet the needs, but, according to Professor Ahmed, there would not be enough professors to teach a larger number of students. Some doctoral graduates in nursing would be qualified to teach, but cannot do so in a faculty of nursing because they are not members of the College of Nurses of Ontario.
The agencies, believes Houssem Eddine Ben Ahmed, represent a “last resort” option, because their use is expensive and entails risks: the staff would not always have their certification from the Order, he says. The Canadian Nurses Association believes that the salary gap between an agency nurse and another nurse can demotivate those employed by hospitals. Montfort has already launched several recruitment initiatives, such as advertising campaigns and language training for workers who are not perfectly bilingual.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.