Tag: creating

N.L. creating new daycare spaces for health professionals with irregular hours

A man stands at a podium in front of three banners. A large statue of Buzz Lightyear as tall as the room itself stands in the background.
Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey announced Thursday that the government is partnering with the YMCA to create 160 new child-care spaces for health-care professionals in St. John’s, Bonavista and Corner Brook. (Jeremy Eaton/CBC)

The Newfoundland and Labrador government is partnering with the YMCA to create new daycare spaces exclusively for health-care professionals with hours outside the standard workday.

The province will open around 160 new $10-per-day spaces in at a new building on St. Michael’s Avenue in St. John’s, Discovery Collegiate in Bonavista and Eastside Elementary in Corner Brook. The spaces should be ready in the next six months and will have hours that meet the needs of medical professionals, said Premier Andrew Furey at an announcement Thursday.

“Your job often starts at 7 a.m. May end at four, may not end at four,” said Furey, who is also an orthopedic surgeon.

“That creates significant child-care issues.… I’ve seen nurses scrambling in the background scrambling being scrubbed, calling out their friends to try and arrange child care for them, and an initiative like this will actually go a long, long way to provide certainty to the hard-working women and men in the system.”

Furey said the program’s longer-term goal is to provide 24/7 child-care options for those who work varying shifts, adding it could attract more nurses and other medical professionals to the province.

“What we are hearing, loud and clear across all medical disciplines, is what people want the most is the professional-personal balance. And this will unlock that for them,” he said.

A woman with brown hair and glasses stands in front of a banner for the YMCA.
Registered Nurses’ Union of Newfoundland and Labrador president Yvette Coffey says health-care professionals are in desperate need of child-care spaces. (Jeremy Eaton/CBC)

The announcement comes after nearly 2,000 health-care workers were surveyed about their child-care needs. Yvette Coffey, president of the Registered Nurses’ Union of

NDP promise to fix health-care system, culture creating optimism

Jillian Horton has worked in health care for more than two decades, and says she’s never heard a premier, or incoming premier, talk about restoring the system the way Manitoba’s Wab Kinew has pledged to do. 

When premier-designate Kinew gave his victory speech last Tuesday, the first people he addressed were health-care workers. The next day, he reached out to them in the legislature and promised to improve the working conditions and culture in facilities. Those messages, alongside campaign promises to prioritize health care, are creating hope. 

“I think he understands something really critical,” Horton said in a Thursday interview with CBC Information Radio host Marcy Markusa.

“We talk about appreciating health-care workers or nurses or allied health-care colleagues, but there’s nothing that says appreciation like safe working conditions. And I do believe that that is absolutely on Wab Kinew’s radar and he’s going to make it a priority going forward. I have to believe that.” 

Horton said the culture of wellness is discussed in health care. That culture includes elements such as an environment in which people can speak up without being belittled, where employees feel fulfilled and leaders are emotionally intelligent. 

It’s an issue across Canada, she said. 

“We’ve seen our nurses mandated to do these crazy amounts of overtime.” 

“It’s so stressful to be shifted, if you’re a nurse in one setting, to be reassigned somewhere else, to have to constantly be learning and learning and learning,” Horton said. “And so when people don’t have that autonomy, they say: ‘You know what, I have to step back, there’s no other way to preserve myself.’ And that’s another big threat that we have to really begin to try to address.”

A picture of a woman.
Dr. Jillian Horton said she’s hopeful health care will improve following premier-designate Wab Kinew’s election. (Submitted by Leif
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