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The Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital’s emergency department had a 10 per cent resignation rate from June through early September, in line with industry standards, according to Halton Healthcare, which operates the hospital.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
More than a dozen emergency room nurses have resigned from a hospital in the Greater Toronto Area over the past two months, owing to unmanageable patient volumes and an unsafe work environment, according to a provincial union.
Fifteen registered nurses have left their positions at the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital, and a number of other nurses have limited their hours or not returned from leave, the Ontario Nurses’ Association said. The Oakville emergency department, which sees roughly 80,000 patients yearly, is now scraping to bolster its work force, the union said.
ONA president Erin Ariss said the Oakville hospital has “turned its back” on its staff, who are experiencing burnout because of an unsustainable workload and frequent violence and abuse from patients. She said the hospital made matters worse by eliminating, earlier this month, unit assistants, who help with such tasks as transporting patients, cleaning equipment and stocking supplies.
“They are overcapacity. They are underwater. They are being assaulted. They are being psychologically harmed by the workplace and then they remove all the support staff,” Ms. Ariss said. “It is overwhelming everywhere in Ontario, but particularly there.”
The swath of resignations underscores a crisis playing out in EDs across the country, which are struggling to retain and attract staff because of severe exhaustion due to overcrowding and health-system dysfunction. Health care workers have stressed that bottlenecked EDs are putting patients at risk.
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The Oakville hospital has been under scrutiny since 16-year-old Finlay van der Werken died in February, 2024, of sepsis and pneumonia after waiting more than eight hours for care. The van der Werken family filed a lawsuit last year against Halton Healthcare, which operates Oakville Trafalgar Memorial.
The Oakville ED had a 10 per cent resignation rate from June through early September, which is in line with industry standards, Adrienne Spafford, a spokesperson for Halton Healthcare, said in a statement on Friday.
“Our exit interviews show that the actual reasons for a majority of these departures are new opportunities, moving to a new community and personal reasons,” Ms. Spafford said.
Referring to unit assistants, she said Halton will introduce personal support workers, often referred to as health care aides, in their place. There were 28 unit assistants at the hospital, one of whom was assigned to the ED, she said.
Halton did not directly respond to a number of questions from The Globe and Mail, including the specific number of nurses in the Oakville ED who resigned or have limited their hours, how many RN positions are required to staff it or if any physicians have resigned.
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Ms. Spafford said there was an “unusual increase” in patient visits between April and mid-September. The Oakville ED recorded 11.4-per-cent growth – the sixth highest in Ontario. She added that there has been no spike in reported workplace violence.
Laurie Rogers, who is the ONA bargaining unit president for Halton Healthcare, said nurses are telling her frequently that they are distressed and looking to change jobs. She said, after the string of resignations, the hospital has been offering overtime and premium payments to maintain coverage, in addition to partial shifts.
“The problem is, when you work your work force continuously, it is going to come to an end because an individual will probably get injured or sick,” Ms. Rogers said. “You can’t run at top speed forever.”
Ms. Spafford said nursing staff are being moved between areas of the hospital to balance workloads, which the union does not agree with. The company is also relying on agency nurses when needed while trying to fill vacancies.
ONA is advocating that the hospital not only improve staffing and workloads but implement nurse-to-patient ratios.
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“You never see a fire truck heading to a dangerous situation with one firefighter, nor do you see one police officer responding to a dangerous call on their own. They have ratios,” Ms. Ariss said. “We’re asking for the same protections.”
She is also calling on the province to better protect health care workers from violence, pointing to the death of two people in their 70s who were shot outside a Scarborough hospital earlier this week.
“It’s getting worse by the day and the Premier is aware of this,” she said, adding she recently showed him a photo of a duffel bag confiscated by a nurse in the northeastern Ontario city of Timmins, filled with guns, knives and ammunition.
“Who, in their right mind, would want to endure the type of abuse that nurses are enduring in this province and the lack of action by the government?”
Lily Barnes, press secretary to Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones, in a statement on Thursday, pushed back against critiques of the provincial government, pointing to several initiatives aimed at violence prevention and guidance for health care settings.