Thought of the Day - January 13 2022 - Nursing

I know I am going to get myself in trouble with this one, but here goes.

Ontario has announced that it will deploy "internationally educated nurses" to hospitals and long-term care homes to address staffing shortages due to COVID-19.

In short, Ontario is fast-tracking foreign workers under a “Supervised Practice Experience Partnership” scheme. It is amazing that just a few short weeks ago there was a long and arduous process for people to apply for a nursing position in one of Canada's provincial health care systems, and now overnight 1,200 people have been accepted, with 300 now starting and another 900 in the wings. Problem solved - right?

Ah, not really. I am not belittling their skills, but remember like many positions there are two parts to nursing: 1) Being a medical nurse, 2) Learning all of the administration, processes and systems.

It reminds me of when an overloaded company department thought the solution was to bring on summer students only to find that the current staff, mired in training duties, meant the department was even less productive.

In short, this might be a great idea long term. However, in order to give everyone involved a fighting chance, a change like this should have been invoked back at the beginning of December, when the inevitable Omicron wave started to become evident.

So what do I predict will happen? Instead of staff in medical facilities and care homes being more productive, we will end up with all concerned preoccupied with a change of policy, practices and onboarding right at the peak of Canada's Omicron wave.

Well, at least the bureaucrats can say they tried.

Cheers

Cliff