How two provincial initiatives helped stem Windsor’s nursing exodus

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When Melissa Mastroianni was preparing to graduate from nursing school, she knew she would have more job opportunities than most health care workers in Canada’s inner cities.

That’s because Ms. Mastroianni, a University of Windsor student who wanted to start her career closer to home, could choose to live in Windsor and work in Detroit, where prestigious research hospitals have been eager to recruit nurses. Canadians.

Despite the lure of a salary paid in American dollars, Ms. Mastroianni accepted a job in the oncology department at Windsor Regional Hospital before graduating in May.

Her decision was prompted by two provincial government programs in the wake of COVID that have helped reduce the nursing workforce in Windsor County to its lowest level since before the pandemic, and could serve as a solution for of hospitals in other parts of Canada looking to improve their nursing standards. while they are recovering from the great crisis of this epidemic.

As of April 1, only 2.7 percent of registered nursing jobs were vacant at Windsor Regional, the only acute care hospital network in the city of 230,000 people. That was down from a peak of 12.5 percent in 2021. At one point during the pandemic, 28.5 percent of emergency department registered nurse jobs were vacant.

Recruiting leaders in Windsor County are blaming changes in the Ontario government’s $25,000 signing bonuses, which have helped reduce incentives long offered by Michigan hospitals, and in the externship program that Ms. Mastroianni which he said helped his decision to stay there. Canada.

He briefly considered applying for a job at a large cancer center in Detroit. But her time working on the Windsor cancer ward as an extern – a new part-time job group where nursing students are paid $20.60 an hour to help patients with tasks such as bathing and feeding – she persuaded him to accept a permanent role. – time to give a job there before he graduates in May.

“I really liked the environment on the oncology floor,” Ms. Mastroianni said. “There are nurses who have worked there for 20 years and you can see that they are still touched by what they do and that they care a lot.”

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Windsor Regional was one of the first hospitals in Ontario to offer paid nursing students at the start of the outbreak, said Karen Riddell, the hospital’s chief executive. He said: “Without those outside workers, we would not have been able to do all the work we did in a quality way. We would have had very short staff. ”

As the epidemic continued, spurring an exodus of skilled nurses, the externship program became a recruiting tool that helped Windsor Regional regain its footing. The province stepped in with dedicated funding in 2021, eventually making the outpatient program available to all publicly funded hospitals.

Windsor Regional has hired 231 former registered nurses and registered practical nurses, while 7,300 nursing students have worked abroad, according to the office of Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones. About half were later hired as full-time employees.

Also, as of 2021, Windsor Regional has hired 308 nurses through the Community Commitment Program for Nurses, a provincial program that offers signing bonuses of $25,000 to nurses who agree to work full hours in the community for two years . As a check against poaching within the province, the bonus is only available to nurses who have not worked in Ontario in the past six months, a group that includes new graduates and veteran nurses lured from jobs in the United States.

It’s not clear how many Canadian nurses cross the border to work, but think tank SecondStreet.org reported last year that border countries licensed 8,909 nurses and 879 doctors with Canadian mailing addresses. Based on a survey of Ontario registered nurses with Michigan nursing licenses, SecondStreet estimated that about 2,000 regularly travel to Michigan for work.

The proximity of the Detroit and Windsor hospitals means that Erin Hodgson, Windsor County’s external recruitment coordinator, faces more competition for nurses at job fairs than her counterparts at other hospitals.

“I’ve been to several events at the University of Windsor where there are many representatives of Canadian organizations but now American hospitals are coming and they can offer jobs immediately, sign bonuses immediately,” he said. like that. “It’s a recruiting problem to compete with that.”

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Nurses who choose Detroit over Windsor tell Ms. Hodgson and Laura Janisse, Windsor Regional director of HR, that the US dollar is very attractive, but so is the fact that non-affiliated hospitals in the US often provide nurses with Canada full-time jobs right after school with the opportunity to set their own schedule. Ms. Janisse said that, due to agreements with the nurses’ union, full-time jobs at Windsor Regional must be outsourced first, meaning it’s common for new graduates to be offered part-time jobs.

On the other side of the Canada-US divide, Patrick Irwin, vice president of human resources at Henry Ford Health, said it would be difficult for Detroit hospitals to compete with Canada’s maternity leave policies, which offer nurses who want to have children. in the future up to 18 months on the job, longer than the average in the US

Detroit’s Henry Ford site is about a 10-minute drive from the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.

Henry Ford’s goal is not to attack Canada’s supply of nurses, he added, but rather to improve medical care in the Windsor-Detroit collaborative area where health workers work at the facilities. in the process of two at some point in their work who share their knowledge.

Ms. Riddell, late CEO of Windsor Regional, is an example. She began her career as a nurse in the neurosurgery department at Henry Ford.

Henry Ford Health currently has 1,100 Canadian employees out of approximately 32,000 employees. About 900 Canadian workers are nurses, said a Henry Ford spokesman. The hospital’s nursing vacancy rate in June was 7 percent, more than double the nursing vacancy rate in the Windsor area.

During her time on the Windsor Regional oncology floor, Ms. Mastroianni noticed — and appreciated — that some of her future colleagues worked at the Karmanos Cancer Center, a large facility. of cancer associated with Wayne State University. and other resources in Detroit, before he decided to return home.

He said: “After that we can all learn from each other.