MONTREAL — The day after a damning report on the state of care in the emergency room at Lakeshore General Hospital in Pointe-Claire was filed, the 135 recommendations have already hit hard. According to the nursing union, management plans to deploy school staff to cover the emergency this summer.

In the conclusion of her report, the independent investigator Francine Dupuis, commissioned by the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, writes that “emergencies need competent personnel”. She adds that “employees need to be well trained, have good judgment and be good listeners (…) because they don’t have much time to make a decision on each individual case.”

Furthermore, Ms Dupuis, in her Recommendation No. 54, calls for “never leaving a new nurse on duty unless she has received her full training in emergency care”.

The former deputy president and executive director of the CIUSSS du Centre-Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, herself a registered nurse, says that it is “a specialized and complex department” and that expertise is just as crucial in the operating room or in the intensive care unit.

However, the Union of Health Professionals of the West Island of Montreal (SPSSSODIM), which is affiliated to the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ), learned on the day the report was presented, Thursday, that the employer wanted to force school nurses to take over evening and weekend shifts at the Lakeshore ER.

“I’m in shock!” declared the president of the local union, Johanne Riendeau.

“In the report (Francine Dupuis) ​​talks about highlighting the expertise and experience we need to provide safe care,” Ms Riendeau continues. There we will ask nurses who do very different jobs in schools to work with unstable patients.”

Worse still, the union fears these nurses are not properly trained to work in emergency rooms.

According to Ms Riendeau, the employer plans to offer these newcomers “four days of orientation,” while the required training for an emergency room recruit would normally take six weeks.

On the CIUSSS side, Deputy President and Director General Najia Hachimi-Idrissi explains that school nurses are used to being reassigned to the network at the end of classes. She adds that these professionals tend to take on jobs they’re already trained to do.

According to Ms. Hachimi-Idrissi, we are initially going through the network on a voluntary basis to meet the need. “We haven’t managed to force people yet,” she says. With regard to the training, which was shortened from six weeks to four days, the PDGA was not able to confirm this information for the time being.

We were then told that we were waiting to “know the profile of the nurses who will be working in the ER before deciding on the training to be given”.

security issues

Nurses at the Lakeshore ER regularly criticize their working conditions to management, but feel they are not being listened to.

Last weekend, the nurses had to put up with an ethical sit-in, as they claimed none of them were trained to run the code room.

Reports are also regularly submitted using the “Safe Care Form” created by the FIQ. Nursing staff can use this to report dangerous situations. A recent denunciation reported an emergency room occupancy rate of 175%, despite the fact that only 50% of the staff were present, ie six nurses on duty instead of twelve.

In light of these findings, the nurses’ union is concerned at the lack of seriousness in the CUSSS’ response. There are fears that the 135 recommendations of the Dupuis report will suffer the same fate as the many other reports presented over the years.

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