Health care workers walk through the hallway at Humber River Hospital's intensive care unit, in Toronto, on April 28, 2021.COLE BURSTON/AFP/Getty Images
Dr. Robert Cushman was the medical officer of health for Ottawa and, more recently, Renfrew County. He also served as the first chief executive officer of the Champlain Local Health Integration Network.
My headache was excruciating; the retching, unbearable.
“One-ninety-nine over – ” I heard a voice say as the band around my bicep loosened. My blood pressure had risen to a dangerous level. I was supposed to be recovering from neurosurgery that I’d had some 24 hours earlier. Alarmed, I thought: So now I’m going to have a stroke too?
“You’re going to be okay,” my nurse said, with a calm but concerned tone.
I needed that reassurance. With confident authority, she explained that I needed intravenous medication to lower my blood pressure, then an urgent CT scan. She needed a doctor’s sign-off for the plan, but she spoke with such conviction that I knew she was completely committed to my well-being. And minutes later, my blood pressure slowly declined.
She temporarily transferred her other patients to a colleague and joined the porter to wheel me to the radiology department. Later, the surgical resident confirmed her suspicion: A craniotomy drain had become overactive. When it was removed, it made all the difference.
I had been admitted to the Ottawa Hospital for the treatment of a chronic subdural hematoma five weeks after a bicycle accident. I had thought I’d escaped from the initial fall unscathed thanks to my helmet, but the damage was internal; two craniotomies later, I was on the road to recovery after a rocky hospital stay with a rebleed and this frightening blood-pressure incident.
As a recently retired physician, I understand the importance of emergency-room physicians and surgeons. But for me, it goes without saying that nurses are the backbone of hospital care. Instead, however, there is too often a broad and troubling lack of recognition of nurses’ skills, duty, experience and compassion – all of which they provide while receiving insufficient financial compensation. And governments haggling over nurses’ wages and squeezing margins in this time of rampant inflation will only damage our health system if we continue to fail to at least appreciate their work.
I was grateful to see that work firsthand. I’m a gregarious person by nature, and so I got to know around eight nurses during my 12-day hospital stay. They were at the beginning of their careers, and it was perplexing to me that they had signed on to the neurosurgery ward, some after completing a final academic placement there: With so many unfavourable outcomes, the neurosurgery ward did not seem like a highly preferred first job for a young nurse. Yet they told me that they chose to work in such a challenging specialty. Their dedication was truly admirable.
What’s more, while my nurses worked the 12-hour shifts that are typical of the job, I learned that the hospital had needed to replace more senior staff who quit during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing burnout, low pay and lack of recognition. The caseloads on the neurosurgery ward were both heavy and scary; two of my own hospital roommates were experiencing situations far more precarious than my own.
The nurses were a diverse group. The nurse who cared for me in my darkest hours was Punjabi; a second had arrived from Ethiopia at the age of 9; a third, who was from the Philippines, was upgrading her requirements for certification in Canada. Another was a refugee who had fled with her family from Colombia’s FARC guerrilla group. The housing affordability diaspora had also brought some of the nurses to Ottawa from more expensive cities across Canada.
My nursing staff mirrored the new Canada. How lucky we are, I found myself thinking, to have new immigrants who are not only trained, but also willing to do the heavy lifting that the health system desperately requires.
Yet compare how Ontario treats other essential workers. Premier Doug Ford’s government has expanded police-academy recruitment and lowered the bar to attend the 12-week training program, including by removing the need for a university or college diploma and making tuition free. Becoming a nurse requires high admission grades, years of training and the ability to take on serious debt. And despite rampant inflation, Mr. Ford has capped annual salary increases for many public-sector workers, including for nurses, at 1 per cent.
The benefits are much higher for police officers, too. The province publishes an annual list of public-sector workers who make more than $100,000, and the number of police officers in Ontario listed increases every year; in 2022, the number exceeded 1,600 in Ottawa alone. There may have been exceptional circumstances because of last year’s occupation of downtown Ottawa, but let’s not forget that during the worst of the COVID-19 years, nurses also worked long and hard hours.
This folly is further exposed when one considers how many police calls focus on mental-health cases. Our health care system requires professionals who are trained in distinct specialty areas to address a broad range of different circumstances. Nurses are highly versatile, and with additional training they can play an enormous role in filling these diverse needs, whether it be the hospital subspecialties or handling mental-health crises in the community. Some nurses have even taken on expanded roles by pursuing training as nurse practitioners to help alleviate Canada’s family-doctor shortage.
Thankfully I had an astute neurosurgery nurse by my side as my systolic blood pressure skyrocketed and I was bent over vomiting. I can only imagine what might have happened to me if there had been a staff shortage that night and a less specialized nurse from another department had been substituted for my care.
Nurses deserve so much more than what they’re currently getting. They need more respect, more support and more money. It’s up to the politicians and policy experts to prioritize what the public values, and to make that happen – so we can offer nurses even an iota of the assurance that they give to us.