As Ontario faces the loss of more than 1,900 registered nurse positions due to staffing cuts, the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU) is calling on Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) and the Ontario government to implement mandatory nurse-patient ratios across the province. Staffing cuts in the province amount to more than 3.1 million hours of care per year.
“Ontario already has the lowest total ratio of nurses to population across all provinces in Canada. In a province that already suffers from long wait times and delays in care, further cuts to the registered nursing workforce will put patient safety at risk,” said CFNU President Linda Silas. “Highly skilled RNs are vital to our health care systems. If hospitals plan to only staff for the good days, there will be no one there for the bad days.”
The CFNU is calling for federal legislation to ensure safe minimum nurse-patient ratios in all health care settings across the country. This recommendation is supported by decades of academic research that have established nurse-patient ratios as a critical global standard for patient safety.
Silas rejected the OHA’s claims that nurse-patient ratios are a rigid and inflexible staffing model.
Nurse-patient ratios are an evidence-based minimum safety threshold to ensure patients are receiving an acceptable standard of care. Within this, there are many opportunities for staffing models that provide flexibility for health care staffing.
“The OHA’s decision to reject decades of research pointing to nurse-patient ratios as a critical solution to safer care and better retention is a deliberate choice to put their budgets over their patients,” Silas said. “The fact that hospital administration is willing to cut highly trained safety-critical staff only demonstrates the mounting need for federal legislation establishing minimum nurse-patient ratios to protect the public’s access to safe, quality health care.”