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Registered Nurses’ Union of Newfoundland and Labrador President Yvette Coffey says private nurses are doing the intake work previously done by public sector nurses. (Mark Quinn\/CBC)<\/p>\nRegistered Nurses’ Union of Newfoundland and Labrador President Yvette Coffey says private nurses are doing the intake work previously done by public sector nurses. (Mark Quinn\/CBC)<\/p>\n
Work previously done by Newfoundland and Labrador’s public sector nurses is now being done by nurses working with a private company, according to the province’s registered nurses’ union.<\/p>\n
Yvette Coffey, president of the Registered Nurses’ Union of Newfoundland and Labrador, calls it a further erosion of the publicly-funded health-care system.<\/p>\n
“That’s money that came out of our public health-care system that could have been used toward the registered nurses, the nurse practitioners or other health-care providers or health-care professionals,” Coffey told CBC News Friday.<\/p>\n
Coffey said the work centres around intake work for family care teams.<\/p>\n
Registered nurses would traditionally call patients who have been assigned to a family care team, but not yet assigned to a family doctor or nurse practitioner, to connect them with virtual care options in the meantime.<\/p>\n
However, Coffey said that work is now being done by nurses working with U.S.-based virtual-care provider Teladoc \u2014 without Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services or the provincial government notifying the union of the change.<\/p>\n
“In [the] Eastern [zone]\u00a0\u2026 they’ve gone ahead and gave that work to Teladoc. Our bargaining unit work,” she said.<\/p>\n
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Coffey says she’s concerned the decision adds further privatization into the health-care system. (Bruce Tilley\/CBC)<\/p>\n
Coffey said the union has filed grievances and has asked for a meeting with the province, but no responses have come back. She said the union found out about the decision to employ private nurses in the role after it was made.<\/p>\n
CBC News has asked officials with the Department of Health for comment, but hadn’t heard back as of Friday evening.<\/p>\n
Coffey said the position would be worked by between 25 and 35 nurses once all of Newfoundland and Labrador’s family care teams are operating.<\/p>\n
They’re also sought after positions, she said, adding the ability to work traditional business hours in a non-physically taxing role is of great benefit to nurses.<\/p>\n
“You can get through the last ten years or the last five years of your career. They have taken away that opportunity,” Coffey said.<\/p>\n
Download our\u00a0free CBC News app<\/a>\u00a0to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our\u00a0daily headlines newsletter here<\/a>. Click\u00a0here to visit our landing page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Registered Nurses’ Union of Newfoundland and Labrador President Yvette Coffey says private nurses are doing the intake work…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-140831","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}