Canada needs urgent solutions to address burnout among health-care workers

Canada’s health workforce crisis has reached a breaking point. Across the country, staffing shortages are leading to emergency room closures, hospital overcrowding, delayed surgeries and diagnostics, family doctor shortages, and long wait lists for continuing care. This places enormous strain on care existing providers. Unfortunately, this chaos has become a day-to-day reality for Canada’s health-care workers. Despite their sacrifices and best efforts to provide every patient with timely, high-quality care, they are being pushed to the breaking point under the accumulated weight of years of resource constraints. And this is not new. Prior to COVID-19, Canadian health-care workers were already experiencing burnout and job dissatisfaction at alarming rates. However, the pandemic made working conditions far worse. Consequently, health care workers are now leaving the profession in greater numbers than ever before. This, in turn, is creating a vicious cycle by adding additional pressure on remaining staff. And the consequences are stark. According to the Mental Health Commission of Canada, 40 per cent of Canadian health care workers are burned out, 50 per cent intend to leave the profession, and only 60 per cent are satisfied with the quality of care they can provide. Without adequate resources to keep up with patient needs, health care workers are facing what experts call 'moral distress.' Moral distress occurs when a person is unable to take what they believe to be the ethically appropriate course of action due to institutional or systemic barriers. For example, staff at the Alberta Children's Hospital recently reported experiencing moral distress when they were so overwhelmed with patients they worried a child could die in the waiting room. This should not be happening in a country as wealthy as Canada. Parents should never have to fear that their child could die for want of care in a hospital, and health-care providers should never be abandoned without the necessary resources to take care of their patients. Frontline health-care workers, experts, and professional bodies have put forward many practical solutions for revitalizing Canada’s health workforce in both the short and long term. These include increasing training and residency opportunities for Canadian students, expanding pathways to licensure for internationally trained workers, implementing pan-Canadian licensure, improving data collection and sharing, investing in preventative health, implementing team-based care models, expanding public long-term care beds, restoring administrative capacity, and improving financial incentives for underserviced areas. Health-care worker retention and return will require comprehensive action to address the root causes that are currently driving people from the sector. After all, any effort to add workers to Canada’s health care sector will be futile if we are simultaneously losing experienced practitioners. All levels of government must, therefore, work together to ensure manageable workloads and safe workplaces, improve compensation and benefits, provide better support for mental health, and protect work-life balance for health-care workers. My home province of British Columbia has recently shown important leadership on this front by becoming the first Canadian province to adopt mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios as part of its plan to improve workload standards. This policy is a key element of the province’s new tentative agreement with British Columbia nurses, which also includes “record-setting compensation.” However, Canada’s health workforce crisis is ultimately a national issue. It cannot be resolved by forcing jurisdictions to compete for a shrinking pool of staff. The federal government urgently needs to partner with the provinces and territories to scale up best practices for the retention, return, and recruitment of health-care workers. After recently establishing bilateral health funding agreements in principle, the federal government is currently negotiating detailed targets, timelines, and common indicators with the provinces and territories. These discussions will provide a key opportunity to establish ongoing intergovernmental collaboration for resolving Canada’s health workforce crisis. Nevertheless, these bilateral agreements will be grossly insufficient in the absence of immediate action. The federal government must not stand by in the face of this mounting crisis. Our country needs urgent solutions to address burnout and moral distress among health care workers. In their absence, both the well-being of frontline providers and the quality of patient care will continue to needlessly suffer. NDP MP Don Davies, who represents Vancouver Kingsway, B.C., was first elected in 2008, and re-elected in 2011, 2015 and 2019. Davies serves as the NDP critic for health and deputy critic for public safety and emergency preparedness. The Hill Times