Health workers skeptical about Quebec’s plan to stop using private agencies in health network

Some Quebec health workers are skeptical about the province’s three-year plan to abolish the use of private agencies in the health network.

With Bill 10, tabled Wednesday, Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé hopes to retain and bring employees back to the public-health sector.

But for many professionals, the path to getting there remains unclear.

“The idea to try to bring nurses back and health-care workers back into the public system and retain them is the ideal, is the optimal. But the thing is, how are we going to do this?” questioned Naveed Hussain, a nurse with the McGill University Health Centre.

“It’s utopic in the sense, let’s get these people who’ve been working in private agencies back into the public sector and everything will kind of resolve itself. But that’s not the reality.”

Health care professionals who left the public system for private agencies often did so for better flexibility in the number of hours they work, as well as higher pay.

“It’s the working conditions that are killing our staff, the nurses, the orderlies, everything,” said Melanie Jade Boulerice, the CEO of Nomadic Nurse Agency. “It’s not just that we’re paying the nurses too much as an agency nurse.”

According to Boulerice, taking away private agency nurses may be less costly, but removing health-care workers who are helping to fill vacancies may put Quebec’s health system in a more fragile state.

“These are not discussions for the bettering of the health care system. These are financial discussions,” she said. “There’s a big portion of nurses who are agency nurses that work at these institutions and they can take up a good portion of the staff.”

‘How is that going to happen?’

Caroline Senneville, the president of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), is also questioning the tangibility of Dubé’s plan.

“The rise of all these agencies is not the cause of what’s going wrong in the health system,” she said. “It’s the consequence. Because working conditions have been degrading, have been have degraded so much the past few years.”

“It sounds more like an intention than really a plan of action or detailed plan of action.”

Hussain also wants to see a more concrete plan.

“If you decide to regulate and change and start fining institutions for having private agencies, you’re going to punish CHSLDs and nursing homes for having private agencies. It doesn’t make sense,” said Hussain. “We really need to understand how we’re going to be hiring nurses back and PABs (préposé aux bénéficiaires) and LPN (licensed practical nurses) back from the private system back into the public system.

“How is that going to happen?”