Canada’s representatives of frontline nurses were in Ottawa this week to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Minister of Health Jean-Yves Duclos, and Minister of Seniors Kamal Khera.

The nurses discussed critical actions needed to tackle the dire shortage of nurses and save Canada’s public health care system.

Tracey Zambory, the president of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN), was one of the many provincial representatives at the meeting.

“We had a really great conversation with the Prime Minister for about 45 minutes, and we talked about the need for, and asked for and called for a Pan-Canadian Health Human Resource Forum and particularly one-day solely in this form dedicated to retention and recruitment of nurses across the country.”

Zambory said that while discussions regarding how to standardize long-term recruitment and retention of healthcare workers are important, work needs to happen now.

“Our members are feeling this extreme pressure of burnout, anxiety, being overworked, and the fear of giving safe patient care needs to be dealt with now, and we know that a forum is something that can be organized now, and a day solely to speaking with nurses across this country can happen now.”

She said the forum would allow them to speak to nurses on the job.

“To bring the leaders of those people together and to share the information of how they feel, on a Pan-Canadian scale, that we would be able to talk about retention and recruitment,” she explained. “We would be able to have conversations about working with willing retirees; we would be able to talk to new graduates about how they see a workplace that is supportive.”

“That support comes from the middle to late-career nurses, the huge retention question because that is where we need to start, we need to start with retention because we are bleeding nurses out of every corner, and that has got to be the main focus of what needs to happen,” she continued.

She said overall, she felt the Prime Minister and Ministers of Health and Seniors understood the urgency of the situation nurses face.

“I believe the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health understand the gravity of this situation because health care cannot run if there are no nurses, and they understand that and the gravity of the situation,” she said. “I believe that we have the opportunity now to have these federal conversations. It shows that we are working very hard at every level of government to try and come up with solutions from a federal lens. Now we need to have better conversations at the provincial level to be able to work on this nursing crisis that is crippling our system.”

Zambory said that they had had similar conversations with Premier Scott Moe.

“We are calling on Premier Moe to form a nursing task force immediately because that is something in the short-term we can get action on now to talk about retention and recruitment with the registered nurses in this province.

Zambory and other Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions members will continue conversations in Ottawa throughout the week.