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Premiers support end to poaching health care workers, says Higgs

ADAM HURAS

Blaine Higgs says there’s support among the country’s premiers to focus more on the international recruitment of health care workers, instead of attempting to poach front line staff from other provinces across the country.

Behind closed doors at a meeting of Canada’s premiers in Halifax saw a debate over what should be fair game in attempting to fill vacant health care positions.

“I haven’t been a big fan of poaching from each other,” Higgs said in an interview with Brunswick News. “What we’re all focused on is international recruitment.”

What resulted is an unwritten agreement among premiers, Higgs said, adding the provinces agreed that sending provincial delegations to job fairs elsewhere in the country aimed at luring university graduates would be acceptable.

“But it’s going into a province, having people working there and actively setting up your own trade fair, making a big splash in terms of coming to another province, the idea is not to get into that situation really,” Higgs said.

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston suggested publicly ahead of the meeting that provinces stop trying to recruit health workers already on the job in other jurisdictions.

That was to be part of the discussion in what Houston dubbed a “health summit” comparing best practices across the country in efforts to address widespread staffing shortages and long waitlists for surgeries and other medical procedures.

“The health-care summit was really about finding ways to support each other,” Houston said at a closing press conference. “To support our own citizens, whether it’s through innovative approaches, whether it’s through technology.”

He added: “Trying to poach workers from another jurisdiction is not really supporting each other. I think there was some agreement on that aspect of it.”

Meanwhile, the premiers from Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador revealed that they first had a private discussion last month over what should be allowed and what shouldn’t in a battle for health care workers.

In September, a newly created health-care recruitment agency in Saskatchewan announced a five-province trip to meet with health-care workers, students and post-secondary institutions in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

That caused Newfoundland’s health minister to travel to Saskatchewan with a delegation to attract health-care workers to move east in retaliation.

“There was a bit of a tit for tat,” said Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey. “But having talked to (Saskatchewan) Premier (Scott) Moe privately and amongst the group we all recognize that health care professionals right now are in high demand, they’re very mobile, but Canada has an absolute imperative to continue to provide top-notch care in our own jurisdiction.”

He added: “Robbing Peter to pay Paul does not help advance that agenda in any way, shape or form. So I think there was significant unity amongst ourselves to prevent an aggressive act of recruitment campaign in other people’s backyards.”

The newest member to the first minister’s table, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, suggested there was a truce.

“The reason why I think that that’s so significant is in the absence of that sort of collaboration, we may compete against one another into a future in which none of us can afford to staff our healthcare systems, in which none of us can sustainably do so,” Kinew said.

Still, other areas need to be resolved.

Furey called for a strategy to limit what are called agency nurses, health care professionals that, rather than working full-time in one fixed location, are employed by an agency and work on a temporary basis within different settings, sometimes across multiple provinces.

That’s often to fill understaffed hospitals, but at higher wage rates.

“Right now we have nurses moving from one province to another fairly quickly, fairly easily, providing bandaid-style care, but also hurting the treasury of the province that they’re moving from as well,” Furey said.

Higgs suggested that finding solutions to stabilizing health care access in each province will address that problem.

“The travel nurse requirement will continue to drop,” Higgs said.

Meanwhile, Higgs said he hoped that a focus on international recruitment over battling with other provinces for the same worker pool would lead to the end of a salary and compensation upmanship from province to province he said isn’t helping deliver better care.

“There’s always been a concern about trying to create a bidding war,” Higgs said.

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2023-11-08T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-11-08T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://tjnews.pressreader.com/article/281870123152339

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