Nurses have the power to transform health care in Canada

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As we celebrate National Nursing Week in Canada, the profession’s leaders are calling for greater transformation of health care.  

“Our health system was designed decades ago when we were a younger, healthier and smaller population,” says Valerie Grdisa, CEO of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA). Impacts on Canada’s health system, such as population growth, demographic shifts associated with an aging population and more people living with chronic conditions, signify the need for greater innovation.  

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“What we see from the health burden… is that we need to do things differently, the way we fund the system, the way we optimize our workforce,” Grdisa says, adding that Canada has traditional models of care in many parts of the nation. “We can’t keep doing things the same way. It’s time to modernize the health systems even more.” 

The CNA believes that some of its public funding taxpayer dollars can be spent in wiser ways. “We’re here to do what’s called ‘bend the cost curve.’ We can do things better at lower costs, and nurses have been demonstrating that for decades,” says Grdisa.  

One of the bigger issues the nursing profession is facing is retention. “We’re struggling to retain the newer generation of nurses, particularly domestically prepared nurses,” Grdisa observes.  

“Many are leaving in their early to mid-30s.”  

More effort is going into ensuring that the system is creating the necessary workplace conditions to retain its current and future workforce. “Nurses need to be protected; they need to have quality of life and work-life balance and opportunities for professional growth.” 

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Another concern is the utilization and optimization of the workforce. Typically, we imagine nurses working at the bedside, or perhaps at their local clinic, or even in schools as public health nurses. “But nurses are in every part of every sector in every system, whether it be in occupational health, in justice centres, or as academics, teaching the next generation as well as their interprofessional colleagues.” Nurses often serve as managers, directors, CEOs and even deputy ministers. The current Minister of Health in Nova Scotia is a nurse. Collectively, nurses bring a dynamic and diverse perspective to health care.  

The resurgence of the role of nurse practitioner (NP), which is the masters-prepared nurse, often with upwards of 10 to 15 years’ experience, has brought positive change to the Canadian health-care landscape. NPs have both diagnostic and prescriptive authority and are able to respond to and meet the primary care needs of Canadians, Grdisa says. 

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More recently, RNs have also received expanded authority. “At the CNA, we believe that nurses could be better utilized and optimized. We now have in many of the provinces and territories, nurse prescribing, so nurses get the prescriptive authority,” Grdisa says. Discussions about this authority were already underway before COVID, but the pandemic accelerated the process. “In terms of RNs prescribing or even other types of nurses, such as LPN’s or Registered Psychiatric Nurses that can get prescriptive authority, that’s been evolving in Canada. In Alberta we were writing the legislation back in 2014.” 

In Ontario there are more than 5,000 nurse practitioners, and that province recently passed the Support for Seniors and Caregivers Act, which allows their nurse practitioners to serve as medical directors in nursing homes or long-term care homes, a role typically reserved for physicians. 

The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) brings both opportunity and challenge to the profession. “We have nurse leaders across the nation who are spearheading digital health initiatives and virtual care solutions,” says Grdisa.  

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Nurses will be using AI to synthesize and integrate the data within a patient’s record and beyond, and to help with decision making. “Nurse researchers across the country are leading the advanced technologies AI transformation,” she says. Mastering and managing new technologies to ensure they enhance patient care will be an ongoing challenge. 

Transformation requires innovation. “Often where we see innovation is where there is a shortage of providers, like in northern remote rural communities where we better optimize the workforce.” That’s where you also find nurses involved in a much broader scope of practice.  

Grdisa says it is critically important that Canadians recognize nurses’ profound impact on how health care is shaped in Canada. “In Canada, health is a human right to get proper health care, and we are a ways away from that in terms of equity and accessibility. We believe that if nurses were better optimized, better utilized, even drawn on more around solutions especially at the policy level, we could have better outcomes and be the healthiest nation in the world.” 

Grdisa has worked as a pediatric nurse, in adult care, and in mental health, and she continues to be fueled by a worthy motivation: “It’s a privilege to help people in some of the most intimate and sometimes really distressing moments of their life.” 

Canada has a highly qualified, talented nursing workforce, Grdisa says. “In Canada, we have to do better to make sure that we keep them.” 

THIS STORY WAS CREATED BY CONTENT WORKS, POSTMEDIA’S COMMERCIAL CONTENT DIVISION

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