Saskatoon nurses plead for help amid over-crowding, patient safety at ERs

The Saskatchewan Union of Nurses is begging the provincial government to look at what is happening in Saskatoon hospitals and take action.

“When is enough, enough?”

That was the phrase being used by Saskatoon emergency room nurses during a union meeting Friday.

“We even are hearing from them today that they’re suffering from PTSD because of issues that are happening when they aren’t able to manage people who are coming in,” Tracy Zambory, the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses president said.

Zambory said she hears of stories from nurses every day about dangerous situations they find themselves in.

At Saskatoon’s St. Paul’s Hospital, dozens of patients are admitted everyday with no available beds.

She described one example of violence in the ER at the hospital. “A fight broke out and the security was involved. There was a weapon involved and an elderly man ended up getting kicked in the head.”

She said the hospital had no room to help the injured man.

“This is absolutely about more than staffing,” Zambory said. “It’s about homelessness. It’s about long-term care spaces, publicly funded, publicly administered long-term care spaces because we have a lot of people that are languishing in hospital that actually need to go out to alternative levels of care.”

NDP health critic Vicki Mowat said she’s increasingly hearing from nurses who are terrified of going to work.

“One nurse at St Paul’s said, ‘I fear every shift that I work at, some major patient safety event will occur because of overcrowding in our unit,'” Mowat said, reporting the the nurse’s comment. “‘It feels like we’re screaming into the void and no one listens or cares.’”

Saskatchewan Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill said the situation is not lost on the province.

“We understand that there’s challenge at St Paul’s Hospital,” Cockrill said. “We did open up some ambulatory care space at Saint Paul’s to just deal specifically with the pressures that we’re seeing there.”

Cockrill also said 300 healthcare professionals hired in Saskatoon over the past year and that the province is reviewing current facility capacities.

But the nurses’ union says the issue goes far beyond one hospital. “I have a group of nurses that are telling me they’re going to leave in masses because they can’t handle it anymore,” Zambory said.