READY TO SCRUB IN BC Children’s Hospital operating room nurses Nartila Romansini, Tina McVeigh, Madeline Ramos and Hannah Egan are just four of the hundreds of nurses taking advantage of the province’s new perioperative education model that’s designed to address BC’s chronic shortage of specialized OR staff.
Lake also characterized the hospital’s OR as having a “tense work environment” — with nurses vulnerable to burnout and difficult to replace. None of this came as a surprise to Meeres. The general duty nurse has worked in the surgical suite at Children’s Hospital for 17 years, and she’s served as a BCNU steward for the past five. “Before 2016 the OR was staffed,” she says. “Then management began to reduce the number of nurses to an amount they thought was adequate. We went from three to two nurses per shift – but that makes no sense because a trauma could come through the door and you would need that third nurse,” she explains. “They were trying to save money.” Meeres attributes the sudden loss of 20 percent of the staff to a 2015 staffing model that used fewer nurses and put increased pressure on those who remained. “A number of seasoned nurses were lost and they were not replaced,” she says. “The management team were saying that two nurses in a room is fine, and no nurses on nights or one nurse at night is fine,” she recalls. “I’m pretty sure that working alone in a tertiary care centre at night should not be an option.” Meeres says nurses wrote many notices of complaint over their employer’s unwillingness to comply with negotiated staffing agreements, but between nurses quitting, moving, getting sick and retiring, the effort had little effect. However, the crisis of May 2016 also became a catalyst for creative problem solving at the hospital. Within a year, the operating room that was once the epicentre of the province’s nursing shortage became the poster child for constructive collaboration and problem solving to address the crisis. With a new management team in place, the challenge lay in finding the number of nurses needed to bring the OR back up to baseline staffing levels and ensuring those staff were adequately educated. But obstacles were in the way. The perioperative program at BCIT did not have additional capacity and other health authorities were unable to assist with
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