ManitobaStaff vacancies, violence and inaction from Thompson General Hospital on improved working conditions have nurses voting on whether to “grey list” the facility, discouraging others from taking jobs there, according to the Manitoba Nurses Union.Posting for 8 safety officers, promised by province almost a year ago, going up soon: ministerListen to this articleEstimated 5 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.Nurses at Thompson General Hospital, pictured here in 2021, are voting on whether to ‘grey list’ the facility, discouraging others from taking jobs there due to what their union says are unsafe working conditions. (Tyson Koschik/CBC)Staff vacancies, violence and inaction from Thompson General Hospital on improving working conditions have nurses voting on whether to “grey list” the facility, discouraging others from taking jobs there, according to the Manitoba Nurses Union.Members of the union working at hospital in the northern Manitoba hub city are casting electronic ballots from Wednesday and until Friday on whether to apply the grey list designation.Union president Darlene Jackson said if the vote passes, a list of recommendations will go to the employer, giving Thompson General Hospital a chance to deal with a number of issues before the facility is officially declared by the union a dangerous place and the union discourages nurses from taking employment there.”Nurses are saying their facility is at higher risk of violence and getting more and more dangerous every day,” she said. “Those nurses shouldn’t have to wait any longer to work in a safe environment, and those patients shouldn’t have to wait any longer [either].” Darlene Jackson, president of the Manitoba Nurses Union, says nurses have been considering a grey list vote for the Thompson hospital since at least last December, when a man barricaded himself in the facility’s chapel and fired a gun. (Prabhjot Singh Lotey/CBC)Jackson said the stabbing of a patient at the hospital in late September was the tipping point that pushed nurses to call for a vote on grey listing.”Nurses are not willing to work in an unsafe facility. They’re not willing to put their patients at risk,” Jackson said. “[They] feel that it’s really time that their employer listened.”Nurses ‘holding the system together’: unionThere are also concerns about staffing levels. Jackson said the hospital’s obstetrics unit has a vacancy rate of over 30 per cent, and the emergency department is also short personnel.”What I heard from nurses is they are exhausted,” said Jackson. “They are tired of holding the system together, because if they’re not working, they know that patient care is not safe.”The union hopes the vote on grey listing is a wake-up call on improving working conditions at the hospital, she said.Without that, “their vacancies are going to become much more and patient care is going to suffer greatly,” said Jackson.The union representing nurses in Manitoba says there are a number of staff vacancies that have worsened working conditions at Thompson General Hospital. (CBC)Nurses in the hospital have been considering grey listing since at least last year, Jackson said, after a visitor barricaded himself inside the hospital’s chapel, pointed a .22-calibre rifle at staff and fired through a window last Christmas Eve.The hospital launched measures to improve security in January, including a nightly lockdown, which the nurses union said at the time were a Band-Aid approach.Manitoba’s health minister also committed at that point to changes that include adding institutional safety officers at the facility, but they have not shown up yet, Jackson said. Instead, police officers from First Nations communities neighboring Thompson were working at the hospital, but Jackson said that program didn’t last long.Unlike institutional safety officers, the security personnel at the facility now don’t have the right to detain people who pose a threat to safety, she said.”Nurses are waiting anxiously for this, and they’re very disappointed that it hasn’t happened sooner,” she said. 8 safety officers coming: provinceA spokesperson for the Northern Regional Health Authority, which is responsible for overseeing the Thompson hospital, told CBC News the facility is working to improve safety, including creating new positions for security guards and a regional security officer role. There are also plans to implement secured and monitored access at the hospital at the beginning of December.Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said they gave the direction last year to have institutional safety officers at the Thompson hospital.They also gave a direction at that point to explore a partnership to work with First Nations police, but this summer’s wildfires in northern Manitoba disrupted that plan, the health minister said.The government says it will initially hire eight institutional safety officers for the Thompson hospital, with a posting for those jobs going up in the coming days. Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says eight institutional safety officers will be hired to work at Thompson General Hospital. (Prabhjot Singh Lotey/CBC)”We recognize that there are still challenges in health care, including in the north and including in Thompson. We’ve worked with them to ensure that they’re taking steps to improve safety and security,” Asagwara told reporters at the Manitoba Legislature on Wednesday. “There’s more work to be done here.”The grey list vote at Thompson General Hospital comes just months after nurses at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg voted 94 per cent in favour of discouraging front-line workers from taking jobs there amid safety concerns, unless conditions improve.Asagwara said Manitoba’s government has made progress in safety and security at HSC while continuing to hire health-care workers, including 39 nurses during the grey listing.Conversations on lifting the designation at HSC are continuing between Shared Health and the nurses’ union, the minister said.”But quite frankly, our priority is making sure that we’re listening to the nurses on the ground, that we are doing the work that’s necessary to improve safety and security.”ABOUT THE AUTHORSantiago Arias Orozco is a journalist with CBC Manitoba currently based in Winnipeg. He previously worked for CBC Toronto and the Toronto Star. You can reach him at santiago.arias.orozco@cbc.ca.
Nurses vote to ‘grey list’ Thompson General Hospital over concerns about violence, vacancies: union
