Amid a shortage of public nurses, more tax dollars are being thrown at private agencies offering to step in for five times the price.
Driving the news: Canadian hospitals and nursing homes paid at least $1.5 billion to for-profit nursing agencies in the past year, according to new research out of Queen's University, a staggering six-fold increase from 2020.
Why it’s happening: During the pandemic, nurses retired or flocked to higher-paying private agencies en masse, forcing many provinces to pay up for temporary nurses to meet staffing needs. That reliance on private nurses has only grown post-pandemic.
- In just four months last year, Newfoundland spent $35.6 million on private nurses, up from an average of just over $1 million a year before the pandemic.
Why it matters: Private nursing is pricey and may not be a sustainable solution given an expected shortage of ~115,000 nurses by 2030. Some experts say that $1.5 billion could go a long way to recruiting and retaining public nurses.
- Québec is already working to ban these agencies, while Ontario, Alberta, B.C., and the Atlantic provinces are all ramping up efforts to recruit more foreign-trained nurses.
Bottom line: Cutting off private nursing agencies entirely could lead to emergency room closures and major surgery backlogs, but continuing to lean on them will incentivize more nurses to go the private route and exacerbate shortages in the public system.—LA