Quebec appoints mediator at Montreal hospital after nurses threaten to quit en masse

Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé is appointing an outside mediator to resolve the nursing crisis unfolding at the emergency room of a Montreal hospital.

More than 90 of the 115 nurses at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal are threatening to quit and signed a petition calling for their manager's immediate resignation for imposing mandatory overtime requirements on staff.

The hospital's emergency room reopened at 8 a.m. Tuesday after authorities asked the public to avoid using it overnight Monday during a demonstration by ER nurses.

"The ship of HMR is sinking," said operating room nurse Pierre-David Gagne. "The situation is very difficult for the nursing staff and other staff too and last night i think they hit the wall."

Minister Dubé acknowledged that several people described the work climate as "toxic."

"It's unfortunate that we had to go through this situation last night but we are really involved right now to find a solution," said Dubé at a Tuesday afternoon news conference.

Dubé agreed with president and CEO of the CIUSSS de l'Est-de-Montréal, Jean-François Fortin Verreault, to "bring in an external person to continue to try to find solutions."

Early Tuesday afternoon, Fortin Verreault said he was confident the emergency room would remain open overnight Tuesday. 

"The objective is to keep the emergency open. There is no doubt, we are working with the teams to do so. Currently, we're able to cover 60 patients on stretchers on the evening shift, we're currently at 62, so we're working to make sure it works there, and that it's in balance," he said.

He said ambulances would transfer fewer patients to the ER and redirect them to other hospitals. The unit chief has been reassigned, he added.

"The person in question is not responsible for the hospital being at overcapacity," Fortin-Verreault said about the unit chief who had become the target of the nurses' scorn. "It is obvious that the relationship with the staff is not there, so we are going to move the person, and they will have different functions."

NURSES AT WIT'S END

ER nurse Amelie Richard started her shift at midnight after her colleagues on the evening shift completed the sit-in.

She worked three 16-hour days in the space of four days the prior weekend, and spoke about what that feels like.

"Sometimes I just don't see the end," she said. "I think we're going to continue this always, when I think it's not a solution. I think we need to do something."

Richard said if the hospital wants to hire staff to make up its chronic labour shortage, it needs to show that it's a good place to work where health-care staff can do their jobs.

"I don't have kids, but I have a lot of colleagues that have family and have kids, and I don't know how they live like this," she said.

The nurses union (FIQ) spokesperson Sonia Djelidi said that the union began meeting with the health and social services board that runs the hospital (CIUSSS-EIM) Tuesday morning.

The board said on Monday to avoid the emergency room at the hospital overnight due to the "exceptional situation."

Health Minister Christian Dube said on Twitter Monday evening that he met with the board head on that day to discuss the situation.

He called it "untenable."
 

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J’ai rencontré le PDG du CIUSSS ce soir qui a eu des discussions avec les infirmières. La situation aux urgences de HMR est intenable présentement, j’en suis conscient. pic.twitter.com/wm05FOAsjL

— Christian Dubé (@cdube_sante) January 17, 2023

According to the ER monitoring site Index Sante, the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital is operating at 115 per cent capacity, one of 15 Montreal hospitals above 100 per cent capacity.

The situation, Richard said, would go from bad to destruction if 100 to 150 nurses decided to leave the hospital for good.

"We're going to fall," she said. "It would be a disaster." 

CRISIS IN OTHER HOSPITALS

The forced overtime and ER overcrowding is not only a problem in Montreal's east end. Radio-Canada reported that at the Jonquière hospital in Quebec's Saguenay region, about 200 kilometres north of Quebec City, ER nurses staged a 30-minute sit-in Tuesday morning.

The nurses were protesting staffing shortages and overcrowding — the hospital's ER had an occupancy rate of 131 per cent by noon.

Nurses at the Lakeshore General Hospital are also appealing to the health minister for better working conditions. The union said while there is no forced overtime at the hospital, staff are not being replaced.

As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, the ER was at over 160 per cent capacity.

One nurse told CTV News the situation should not be tolerated.

"I can't sleep. My personal life is a disaster. But I'm loyal to this job. I happen to love my job so I keep coming back and trying to help and trying to change things," said Nathan Friedland.

"But I cannot do this alone. The government has to listen. Why isn't Christian Dubé enacting a nurse-to-patient ratio?"

LIBERAL CRITIC BLAMES CAQ FOR 'INCOMPETENCE'

Liberal MNA for Pontiac, André Fortin, is blasting Dube and the CAQ government for their management of the crisis at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital, which he says reflects the CAQ’s “incompetence” in health care.

"After five years of the CAQ government, not only has the emergency room situation not improved, but our health-care system is cracking all over. This is an abject failure on the part of the minister and a crisis of leadership, as he refuses to get directly involved when problems arise," he said in a statement released Tuesday morning.

According to the official opposition health critic, "the closure of the Maisonneuve-Rosemont emergency room was foreseeable for months and is another demonstration of the CAQ's ineffectiveness" especially since Dube "refused to hear the nurses' call for help and to act before the crisis broke out," he said.

With files from The Canadian Press