At the time, the evening shift staff at Minnedosa Health Centre included three nurses and one health care aide.

The nursing team was faced with a ballooning workload stemming from an open Emergency Room, in addition to dealing with patients in a 27 bed acute care facility.

Local president Teresa Wareham and then vice-president Darcy Hutton encouraged staff to diligently fill out Workload Staffing forms following each overwhelming shift. Wareham and Hutton created their own version of a WSR teaching tool used by Labour Relations Officers from the union, which explained in detail the process of filling out the forms and the importance of filling them out after each overwhelming shift.

The nurses also developed their own form to track emergency room usage with information regarding patient time in, acuity, time out, admitted, transferred etc. This data was collected over time and was used to support the claim to management about the high workload.

Furthermore, letters of summary were attached to some WSRs, questioning amount of over time being used, expressing concerns about patient safety, staff well-being, the right to a reasonable workload, loss of job satisfaction, difficulty recruiting new staff and retaining senior staff.

Read the entire story in the November issue of Front Lines.