Bill to limit private health agencies in Quebec passes
Posted April 19, 2023 10:57 am.
QUEBEC CITY – The bill to limit private health agencies was adopted by the National Assembly on Tuesday. All members present in the chamber voted in favour.
The long-term goal is to completely ban agencies as early as December 2024 for large centers like Quebec City and Montreal.
Most other regions will have until December 2025 to end the use of agencies.
“And that gives us time to make the connection with the collective agreement negotiations that are taking place in parallel,” explained Health Minister Christian Dubé at a press scrum at the National Assembly.
In the meantime, the law will determine the conditions allowing the health sector to use the services of an employment agency. This includes a maximum fee. Fines of up to $150,000 will also be imposed if these conditions are not met.
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The Minister explains that approximately 30,000 employees per year leave the health care system, 10,000 of them due to retirement. He therefore hopes that good collective agreements will be negotiated with the unions in order to retain the other 20,000 employees in the network who leave for other reasons.
“There are a lot of nurses who are interested in coming back. I’m hearing that. But they need to have good working conditions,” says Dubé.
Quebec is dependent on these external agencies, which provide public health care institutions with personnel on demand, in particular to make up for the labour shortage.
The use of independent labour cost the public network $960 million in 2022, an increase of 380 per cent since 2016, according to data from the Ministry of Health.
It represents 14.8 million hours worked, up from 4.8 million six years ago.
Consultations for Bill 15, which aims to make the health system more efficient, begin Wednesday. “If I look at the collaboration we’ve had from the oppositions (…) I think it bodes very positively for the bill,” the minister said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on April 19, 2023.
