Today's turnout may not be as impressive as in Vancouver at the end of May, but the BCNU's grievances were no less acute. And there might have been more of them picketing if not for its members being overworked and burned out.
Two dozen nurses affiliated with the BC Nurses’ Union rallied outside of the Victoria General Hospital to denounce the government’s lack of action in addressing their acute worker shortage and notoriously horrendous working conditions.
Vice president Adriane Gear addressed the crowd, pressing among other issues the 39% vacancy rate in nursing positions across the province, the primary factor behind the province’s nurses leaving the profession, and demanded of the Ministry of Health a healthier nurse to patient ration to redress the situation.
The rally comes two days after the Saanich Peninsula Hospital announced the overnight closure of its ER over the summer due to shortage of staff, the latest in a long list of such closures all over BC, which every now and then cause patients to die at the ER after waiting long hours without care.
A recent BCNU rally in Vancouver had already castigated the government for failing to address their relentless complaints of unsafe working conditions.
This crisis was long in coming. While exacerbated by the recent pandemic, it stems from a plethora of factors, from obscene red tape hindering nurse accreditation to the ballooning housing crisis.
And while it wasn’t part of today’s list of revendications, the BCNU also took objection to mandatory COVID vaccination policies preventing numerous unvaccinated nurses from rejoining the workforce. MLA Dan Davies and Merritt mayor Michael Goetz have both recently echoed this sentiment.
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Never take your rights for granted. Women in particular know even hard-earned ones are never far from being taken away.
Although the event was a relative success, its outcome leaves me most apprehensive. Regretfully, we had to end it early.
