Nurses’ union consults with members and holds out hope for a fall deal
NBNU president Paula Doucet is hoping that collective agreements with the union’s three bargaining units will finally be in place sometime this fall.
After tentative deals with two bargaining units—nurse supervisors and part III nurses, which includes hospital nurses—were “overwhelmingly rejected” on August 12, the union is re-grouping and consulting with its members to figure out where the issues lie.
The union held meetings last week and is planning a gathering of local presidents in Fredericton on August 31 to “get a pulse and a feel of what the misses and the hits were with our recent tentantive agreement rejection,” says Doucet.
The last collective agreement with the NBNU expired on December 31, 2018.
“We were given a mandate by our members three years ago,” says Doucet. “And as you can appreciate three years of bargaining is a long time and things have changed.” Doucet says the pandemic has also “played havoc on the work life of the registered nurses and nurse practitioners in this province. So we’re just really wanting to hear back again from our members, and to validate and see if the mandate is still very much relevant today as it was three years ago.”
The nursing shortage is exacerbating already difficult working conditions for nurses, as they are asked to work longer hours and larger amounts of overtime.
Doucet says that the lack of a collective agreement for more than two and a half years is part of the reason why nurses aren’t looking at New Brunswick as a possible destination to practice.… Continue
Tentative deal for nurses union a positive step in current vacancy crisis
After more than two and a half years in negotiation, the provincial government and the New Brunswick Nurses Union have reached tentative collective agreements for two bargaining units including more than 6,000 registered nurses, nurse practitioners, nurse managers and nurse supervisors. The province announced the deal in a news release Friday morning, and said details of the agreements will be withheld pending ratification.
The tentative agreements are a positive step in a crisis that has seen a nursing shortage cause reduced emergency room services in three rural hospitals in New Brunswick, including the Sackville Memorial Hospital.
CHMA spoke the New Brunswick Nurses Union president Paula Doucet back in June to talk about the shortage, the current plight of working nurses in the province, and potential solutions.
Hear Paula Doucet speaking on Tantramar Report:
“Unfortunately, the entire provinces is feeling this the nursing shortage,” says Doucet, “whether you’re in Sackville or Campbellton, Grand Manan, Saint John, Fredericton, Bathurst, Edmundston… Pick your community, pick your city, we’re all in this.”
Sackville’s emergency room is down three RNs from a full complement of nine. “For a facility of the size of Sackville, missing three nurses or five nurses or even one nurse, you really feel that,” says Doucet. And then, “not too far down the road, you look at what’s going on at the George Dumont or the Moncton City Hospital, where in one facility, there’s upwards of 125 vacancies.”
When CHMA spoke with Doucet in June, the scale of the province-wide shortage was pegged at 700 vacancies.… Continue