300+ NBers were travel nurses last year

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More than 300 New Brunswick nurses provided travel nursing services in other jurisdictions in 2022-23 rather than work in the province’s health-care system, Brunswick News has learned.

New data obtained through the Nurses Association of New Brunswick (NANB) provides a snapshot of the movement of travel nurses in and out of the province between Dec. 1, 2022, and Nov. 31, 2023.

During that time, Horizon and Vitalité health networks were relying heavily on travel nurses –  through a series of contracts signed with private agencies – to fill gaps at hospitals at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In total, 538 nurses from other jurisdictions provided travel nursing services in New Brunswick in 2022-23, according to NANB. Meanwhile, 309 New Brunswick nurses – or three per cent of the province’s 9,765 active practice nurses – worked outside of the province through travel nursing contracts during that same timeframe.

“It’s shocking, but unfortunately it’s not surprising,” said Green party Leader David Coon, who is currently on a health-care tour across the province.

“We’ve been hearing repeatedly that nurses have been leaving the bedside and choosing to work elsewhere, including for agencies, and you can’t blame them.”

Both Coon and Liberal Leader Susan Holt zeroed in on the Progressive Conservative government’s ongoing refusal to provide retention incentives to New Brunswick nurses.

Last March, Premier Blaine Higgs told media he didn’t want to get into a war over wages with Nova Scotia in the wake of its Tory government offering its nurses up to $20,000 each if they pledged to work full time for two years.

By that point, Prince Edward Island, along with Newfoundland and Labrador, had already introduced their own nursing incentives.

Instead of offering bonuses, Higgs told media the New Brunswick government needed to “go deeper” and fix the “real concerns” of nurses and health-care workers.

“The underlying issue is they feel overwhelmed and they need support,” he said at the time.

Brunswick News requested interviews with Higgs and Health Minister Bruce Fitch Thursday to discuss the NANB data. The newspaper didn’t receive interviews nor a response to its question asking if the government planned to reconsider its position on retention incentives as a result of the travel nurse data.

The Higgs government has been under fire for its spending on travel nurses rather than retention bonuses following a recent Globe and Mail investigation. That investigation revealed Vitalité is paying Toronto-based Canadian Health Labs at a rate of more than $300 per travel nurse – six times what a New Brunswick nurse makes an hour.

Up to $158 million worth of contracts were signed with CHL back in 2022. Meanwhile, the New Brunswick government would need to spend $100 million to provide a $10,000 bonus to each nurse in the province, a legislative committee heard last week.

Holt, who is also on her own provincial health-care tour, said the lack of retention bonuses hasn’t been the primary complaint from nurses she’s spoken with so far. Instead, nurses have complained they aren’t being “respected, heard, valued” by the provincial government.

“There’s a money component there because we’re not obviously attracting people to the work, but for the people who are in the system now, really for them it’s not about money,” she said.

“They want to care for people to the quality that they were trained and that they know they can, and many of them are traumatized by the fact that they can’t deliver the care they know they should because of a lack of staffing and terrible working conditions.”

N.B. ‘cannot afford to lose another nurse’: union

The new travel nurse data confirms a recent suspicion of the New Brunswick Nurses Union (NBNU).

Last July, the Nurses Association of New Brunswick (NANB) – the licensing authority for the province’s registered nurses and nurse practitioners – announced it had registered 657 new nurses between December 2022 and May 2023.

But according to data obtained by NBNU, Horizon had only hired 118 nurses during those six months and Vitalité had only hired 116 nurses from January to June 2023.

“We knew that the majority of these new nurses registered would have been travel nurses,” NBNU president Paula Doucet said in a statement Thursday.

In a CBC interview this week, Higgs said New Brunswick has hired 1,100 licensed practical nurses since 2018, noting the province has “more nurses in the system than we’re retiring.”

Since April 2023, Horizon and Vitalité have recruited a combined total of 278 permanent nurses, but that’s only resulted in a net increase of 125 nurses once departures and retirements are factored into the equation, a legislative committee heard last week.

“We need our government to halt the use of travel nurses and immediately invest in retention initiatives so that we maintain our existing nursing workforce,” said Doucet, whose union represents 8,500 nurses across the province.

“We cannot afford to lose another nurse to travel nurse agencies.”

The new data provided by NBNA was collected when nurses filled out their online renewal forms for their licenses. They were asked to identify if they were travel nurses and whether they were working in New Brunswick, but those questions weren’t mandatory to fill out to submit the form, according to NBNA.

New Brunswick travel nurses also weren’t required to disclose the jurisdictions where they’re providing services.