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Nurses at St. Boniface Hospital have voted in favour of grey-listing the facility — a decision their union says comes in the midst of ongoing concerns about violence, inadequate security measures and staffing pressures at the Winnipeg hospital.
The Manitoba Nurses Union said Friday 94 per cent of nurses who voted supported the measure, which designates the hospital an unsafe workplace and discourages other members from taking jobs there.
St. Boniface is now the third hospital in Manitoba where nurses have voted in favour of grey-listing over the last year, following the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg and Thompson General Hospital.
Nurses’ union president Darlene Jackson says the grey-listing is a reflection of not only security concerns for staff at the facility, but nurses assuming patient loads that are unsustainable.
“We can’t call it a safe facility if we’re not providing safe patient care,” she told CBC Radio’s Up To Speed on Friday.
Nurses need to have the ability to oversee their patients, observe any trends in their condition and intervene before their condition worsens, she said.
Proper nurse-to-patient ratios need to be maintained to allow for that, but Jackson said some nurses are currently looking after twice as many patients as they would have in recent years.
“We know that violence and abuse of front-line health-care workers is escalating all the time, but we’re also at St. Boniface looking at patient safety,” she said.
‘Not asking for the impossible’
The vote comes after safety issues including the sexual assault of a nurse in the parkade of St. Boniface Hospital on the night of Nov. 8. A 27-year-old man was charged with sexual assault in that incident.
And last month, the family of a 94-year-old woman said she was assaulted by another patient at the hospital.
Jackson said in a news release that it’s up to St. Boniface to “meet the reasonable conditions set out by nurses” to lift the grey-listing, which include “stronger protections [and] a workplace culture that values their safety,” as well as steps to ensure proper staffing ratios.
Improving work conditions is also important for hiring and retaining nurses in the future, Jackson said.
“Although this is a short-term action, I believe in the long run we are going to have much better patient care in this province, and we’re going to be able to retain nurses,” she told Up To Speed.
Grey-listing taken ‘very seriously’: WRHA
Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara told CBC News in a statement the province has been working to improve safety and security within the health-care system.
Asagwara said their NDP government has expanded institutional safety supports and introduced practical measures, like monitored access points and amnesty lockers, which offer a place a hospital entry points where visitors can leave prohibited items
The government will continue talking with nurses and the union to get feedback in hopes of moving forward with more improvements, the health minister said.
Leadership at St. Boniface Hospital takes the grey-listing “very seriously,” a spokesperson for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority told CBC.
The health authority said that over the past two years, it has taken measures to enhance safety that include hiring 18 institutional safety officers, adding overnight roving security, upgrading security cameras and limiting hospital entrances.
Following the November assault, St. Boniface Hospital also rolled out a safety app for staff to get emergency notifications and connect to security.
The health authority said the work to improve security is ongoing and acknowledges there’s still more to do.