The Quebec government has announced it will give bonuses of $15,000 to full-time nurses, part-time nurses in the public system who are willing to work full-time and $12,000 to nurses who have quit if they come back, as part of its emergency plan to fix the staffing crisis in the health-care network.
At the announcement Thursday afternoon, Premier François Legault said the plan would cost close to $1 billion, but that the government had to offer financial incentives as thousands of exhausted workers had fled the system during the pandemic.
“Nurses have taken care of us for a long time. It’s time we take care of them,” Legault said.
Health Minister Christian Dubé said only 60 per cent of nurses in the public system work full-time, adding that that is “not enough.”
He hopes the incentives will convince an extra 15 per cent to work full time and will also attract about 4,300 nurses back into the system.
Dubé said having more nurses working would improve schedules and significantly reduce forced overtime, which became a common practice during the pandemic.
The government also hopes to reduce the widespread use of private temp agency workers.
“The public network has to be the better place to work, not these agencies,” Legault said.
Legault also announced the government will hire 3,000 administrative workers to assist nurses with any bureaucratic duties, allowing them to focus on caring for patients. He said nurses estimate they spend up to 30 per cent of their time filling out paperwork.
The administrative staff will be trained over the coming months and are expected to be ready by the spring.
Nurses in five Quebec regions where the situation is particularly dire — including the Outaouais, Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the North Shore, Northern Quebec, and the Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine — would receive an additional bonus of $3,000.
In recent months, several hospital ERs in the province have been forced to close temporarily, curtail hours or are operating at more than 200 per cent capacity due to a lack of personnel since the beginning of the pandemic, as nurses decry how dismal working conditions have become.
In July, doctors for another health board, the CIUSSS de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, penned an open letter to Quebec’s Health Ministry, warning of a breakdown of ER services because of staffing shortages caused by nurses fed up with pandemic working conditions.
According to Quebec’s Order of Nurses, about 20 per cent more nurses are working for private agencies this year, suggesting hundreds have left the public sector since the start of the pandemic.
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