Canadian nursing job vacancies triple in five-year span: MEI report

Canadian nurses are leaving the profession in droves with job vacancies tripling within a five-year period, according to a new report from the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI).

The report shows the number of nursing job vacancies in the country jumped from 13,178 in 2018 to 41,716 in 2023.

For every 100 nurses under the age of 35 who registered to practice, 40 others quit the profession, according to MEI.

Bryce Boynton, a registered nurse and the president of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses, falls under the 35 and younger category. He said he understands why young nurses are leaving.

“I’m really concerned,” he told CTV News, adding moral injury and burnout are the biggest factors driving nurses out.

“We do a lot of discussions on recruitment, but we never talk about retention. We never talk about retention of the mid-to-late career nurses who are going to be able to provide that expertise.”

According to a recent survey from the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, it’s becoming more common for nurses to work involuntary overtime, experience some form of violence or abuse on the job and show clinical signs of anxiety or depression.

“I think a lot of us are just tired,” said Sara Peters, a registered nurse and clinical coordinator in the emergency department at Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital (RUH).

Earlier this month, 450 health-care workers at RUH signed a letter that calls on the provincial government to address emergency department overcrowding, nurse retention, staffing and patient safety concerns.

Peters penned the letter with the help of her colleagues. She said it provides short-term solutions that could be quickly implemented in days or weeks.

“We’re tired of apologizing for things that are out of our control. We want to create change,” she said, adding that she reached a breaking point when the health authority designated hallways for patients to be treated in on a regular basis.

Peters said the emergency department has very high turnover rates and she hopes the letter creates an opportunity to work with officials to improve nursing conditions.

“It’s an ongoing joke that an emergency nurse’s life is two years or less because of the fast-paced environment, the stress, our workload and the acuity that we see every day just can’t support longevity in emergency nursing,” Peters said.

Similar issues plague hospitals across the country, and simply training more nurses won’t solve the problem, according to the MEI report, which highlights British Columbia as a beacon of improvement.

The report suggests B.C. has cut its turnover rates of young nurses in half over the last decade.

Adriane Gear, president of the B.C. Nurses’ Union, says nursing job vacancies dropped slightly in the last quarter, but there are still more than 4,000 vacancies.

“That’s still a ton,” she said, adding the province continues to lose nurses as a result of workplace violence, stress and burnout that is generated from immense workloads.

From the improvement they have seen, Gear credits the introduction of minimum nurse to patient ratios. B.C. is the first jurisdiction in Canada to implement them.

“We are making headway, but I really caution us (from becoming) complicit, because there is so much more that needs to be done to improve the conditions of work for nurses, which, frankly, are the conditions of care for patients,” she said.

MEI researchers urge provinces to emulate B.C.’s shift-swapping pools, which allow nurses to trade shifts more easily. The report also highlighted the province’s streamlined accreditation process for internationally educated nurses that has helped with recruitment.