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Lakeshore management announced last week it would be closing two of its four ORs, though it didn’t explain that the move was primarily to free up precious nurses. “We have waiting lists that have gone up to one and two years, the doctors are pushing us, we're trying to help. “We're playing catch-up a year of being run-down,” she said.
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Minister Dubé said earlier this month that the province as a whole is short more than 4,000 nurses. One woman at Lakeshore quit suddenly last week in light of the news of the staff shuffle, the nurse said, and two are planning to do the same this week. The sit-in was a last resort, the nurse said, to tell the hospital the group had reached their breaking point and can’t afford to lose any more colleagues to early retirement, resignation or simply to other units of the hospital. Now, Lakeshore has told its remaining OR nurses-roughly 18 of them-that some in the group will be seconded to the intensive care unit as it prepares for a fourth wave of COVID-19. It hasn’t eased since, and Lakeshore’s operating rooms have been a microcosm of what Health Minister Christian Dubé, and health staff unions, have described: burnout has led people to quit, which has further added to the strain of those remaining. Their workload during the pandemic hasn’t quite tracked with many of their colleagues’ experiences, the nurse explained.įor OR nurses, the workload began to shoot skywards during summer 2020, when COVID-19 cases eased off - doctors then began frantically trying to work through their ever-lengthening surgery backlogs. Other nurses at Lakeshore have staged sit-ins before, including one in September 2020, but the small group of operating-room nurses hasn't done so until now. “I’ve had to work 22 hours in a row, and after sleeping two hours, had to be functioning for another 24 hours of work,” said the nurse, who didn’t want her name published. One of the protesting nurses described being made to work nearly 48 hours in a row, and that was under the current, more robust staff schedule, she said. Operating-room nurses at Lakeshore Hospital staged a sit-in Tuesday morning, saying they’ve been made to work nearly around the clock and want to refuse a move to further skeleton staffing.