Majority of nurse vacancies are in northern N.B., Vitalité data shows

Vitality Health Network says its recruitment efforts are showing tangible results in New Brunswick, but if we take a look at the data, nurse recruitment is seriously lagging across the north. There are 130 nursing vacancies across the province, but nearly three-quarters of them are in Acadie-Bathurst, Restigouche and the northwest. Folks in the north feel like that they've been forgotten about, that there's not as much investment, there's not as much attention. And really, folks in the north then have to travel a little bit further to to access the different types of health care needs that they might have. So I think, you know, it puts a divide. And as long as I've known, there's always been this north and south divide. But that's the reality. Last month, the Campbellton region was so short-staffed that Vitalité pulled nurses from primary care to fill vacancies in the ER. Vitalité says it struggles to recruit in the north because it's hiring from a smaller pool of French candidates and it's facing steep competition from employers in Quebec. Vitalité runs 11 hospitals and 44 clinics, mostly in smaller rural areas. Horizon runs 12 hospitals and more than 100 clinics in urban centers. And if we compare the two, Horizon is significantly outpacing Vitalité when it comes to hiring nurses. Since January of last year, Vitalité hired 558 nurses. In that same period, Horizon hired nearly 1,500. Doucette believes one thing Vitalité can do to retain staff is improve morale. The nurses that I represent in all of the regional health authorities and in particular Vitalité talk about the difficulties that they have with upper management and the level of distrust and the level of disrespect that they feel. That has broken down and so that has a trickle effect and so until you mitigate and you fix that level of Distrust and discourse, it's not going to get any better. Survey results presented at the network's board meeting on October 27th rate the level of recognition employees get at work as 6.5 out of 10. When it comes to recognition, it comes from the voice of our employees that we need to be better. Vitalité's assistant CEO says that feedback comes directly from employees and that the network will work hard to improve it. We asked Vitalité for comment on the allegations of distrust brought by the union, but we haven't heard back. It's always better when you could say yesterday you should have, but they need to be actively recruiting and doing, you know, a better job at trying to get folks back up to the north of the province. It's not a quick fix. It's not going to happen overnight. But you need to have a plan in place, you know, to mitigate all of these shortfalls that we're seeing right now. Vitalité says it also needs to invest in developing the new workforce in the north and to focus on retention. Many of its new hires are nursing graduates who still need to be trained in ER and intensive care positions.