Houston, other Canadian premiers vow to stop poaching health-care workers from other provinces

Several Canadian premiers say they will no longer poach health-care workers who are working in other provinces or territories. 

Over the two-day meeting between Canada’s premiers at the convention centre in Halifax, the group discussed the issues plaguing their health-care system. 

And the shortage of health-care workers across the country is not unique to each province/territory.

“The health-care summit was really about finding ways to support each other, to support our own citizens,” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston, joined by all Canadian premiers except Northwest Territories due to the Territorial election, said at a news conference in Halifax on Monday afternoon. 

“So trying to poach workers from another jurisdiction is not really supporting each other.” 

Houston said he believed there was some agreement amongst the premiers when it came to keeping their tabs off health-care workers working in other provinces. 

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey said there was a “tit for tat” between his province and Saskatchewan when it came to health-care workers a few months ago. 

However, Furey said after he and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe spoke, the two came to an agreement that prevented an “aggressive, active” recruitment campaign in other provinces.

“Canada has an absolute imperative to continue to provide top-notch care in our own jurisdiction and robbing Peter to pay Paul does not help advance that agenda in any way, shape or form,” Furey said. 

Furey said the premiers also discussed taking a unified approach against limiting agency nurses as all provinces are seeing agency nurses bounce from province to province. 

“Right now, we have nurses moving from one province to the other fairly quickly, fairly easily, providing Band-Aid-style care while also hurting the treasury of the province that they’re moving from,” he said. 

Provinces and territories limiting agency nurses is something the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU) urged the premiers to move forward with as soon as possible.

“Nurses can only tolerate unhealthy and unsafe working conditions for so long, which is why such an alarming number have left their jobs in the public system to work for costly private agencies or have abandoned the profession altogether,” reads an open letter, co-signed by nurses’ union presidents from each province, addressed to Canada’s premiers. 

CFNU said patient safety suffers when nurses are overworked and there are staff shortages within units. 

And while some provinces will refrain from recruiting actively working health-care workers in other provinces, Houston noted it’s fair that provinces will continue to recruit future health-care workers from post-secondary institutions and abroad. 

“Canada has an absolute imperative to continue to provide top-notch care in our own jurisdiction and robbing Peter to pay Paul does not help advance that agenda in any way, shape or form.”

– Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey

Moe, Yukon Premier Ranj Pillai, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew agreed that there needs to be more focus on recruiting health-care workers from abroad.

Smith thanked Houston for connecting people within her office to those in Nova Scotia who have recently had success in recruiting nurses from the Philippines to the East Coast. 

“I suspect what you’ll see is the premiers working very diligently and collaboratively to try to recruit from abroad, whether its Philippines or another nation, and then also working on foreign credentials recognition, as well as recognizing the credentials across the country so there is the ability to move seamlessly between jurisdictions,” Smith said. 

Houston said premiers were also proud to share the work being done in their home province when it comes to improving health care, such as the use of surgical robotics in Nova Scotia and the new YourHealthNS mobile app.

Other provinces shared what they’re doing differently when it comes to their health-care system, such as surgical centres, transparency around physician wait-lines and virtual triage for patients from their homes before they go to the emergency department. 

“I’m optimistic that the lessons learned at this table will help all of us move a little quicker,” Houston said.