Achi news desk-
New Brunswick’s French health service says expenses exceeded revenue over the first 11 months of the last fiscal year by nearly $98 million.
The main reason, the cost of 190 full-time equivalent agency staff, or travel nurses, needed to run services in the Vitalité Health Network.
New Brunswick Health Minister Bruce Fitch was asked about the cost and what the province plans to do about it.
“We are working with Vitalité, trying to find ways that they can, one alleviate their needs for travel nurses and there is significant recruitment happening right now in our department, within Vitalité,” said Fitch.
Travel nurses have been needed to fill critical gaps in the province’s healthcare system, but they cost a lot of money.
The New Brunswick Nurses Union recently discovered that during a five-month period in 2023, Vitalité and Horizon Health Network spent nearly $57 million on contracts for travel nurses.
Union president Paula Doucet said she was not surprised to hear that Vitalité’s expenses exceeded revenue by $97.8 million.
“We were really shocked by the amount of money that has been paid. However, recognizing that because they haven’t really done a great job of retaining or recruiting new staff, their hands were tied and this was their only outlet to continue providing care to New Brunswickers,” Doucet said.
On Tuesday, Horizon Health Network president and CEO Margaret Melanson said they are in the process of phasing out travel nurses.
“We’re down to, I believe, less than 35 travel nurses across the organization,” Melanson said. “We have a target to phase out all those traveling nurses by August. That is our intention at the moment.”
Doucet said the nurses’ union also thought it was possible to wind them up.
“Until two years ago we had no travel nurses here in the province. We’ve relied heavily on them for the last two years and I think it’s a Band-Aid solution and I think anything is possible if we put the resources in the right place to keep and attract nurses to this state,” said Doucet.
One possible solution is international recruitment.
Fitch said the province and Vitalité are specifically targeting French-speaking countries such as France, Morocco and Belgium. However, recruiting professionals to work up north is proving difficult.
“There are fewer Francophone nurses available throughout New Brunswick and throughout Canada and throughout the world,” Fitch said. “They have some communities in the north, which are still a bit more difficult to recruit for them, and that is why there are incentives for people to go to those areas and work in those facilities.”
Doucet believes that international recruitment is only part of the puzzle and not the only solution.
“There are domestic people here that we would be better served if we tried to attract them and get them to take up nursing as a possible career choice,” said Doucet.
There are parameters in place when it comes to international recruitment, Doucet said, which prohibit countries from taking too many professionals from less wealthy countries.
He emphasized that recruitment and retention go hand in hand and that the province and the health network need to make sure they put some emphasis on retaining the experienced staff that are already here.
“Every new nurse that comes into our system needs to have a very robust orientation and mentorship program,” Doucet said. “Without those experienced nurses to provide we’re actually setting up new recruits to fail.”
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