THE UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA DECEMBER 11, 1998

Listen to the nurses, urge UVic nursing educators

Nurses' conditions of work must be improved if the health care system is to recruit and retain the nurses needed to care for British Columbians, say Drs. Paddy Rodney and Rosalie Starzomski, faculty members at the UVic school of nursing's Lower Mainland campus.

B.C. nurses recently agreed to return to work after strike action over staffing shortages and lack of health care funding.

"When nursing students see the working conditions facing nurses, why would they want to enter the health care system?" says Starzomski, who adds that the province needs to do some resource planning now to project the health system's future requirements for nurses, doctors and other health professionals.

"It's difficult to even pull together information about numbers of professionals working in the system because of the overtime worked by many persons and the fact that, for example, one nurse may be working in more than one facility. Tracking this information is a major challenge."

Rodney praises the nurses for "consistently taking the high moral ground" in their strike action and maintaining the focus of the dispute on inadequate staffing levels. "When you have appropriate health care teams, standards, and staffing, you start to see better patient outcomes which also creates monetary benefits. Current working conditions require nurses to be deployed in ways that are less and less ethical."

Both Rodney and Starzomski specialize in the ethics of nursing and health resource allocation and are practising members of ethics committees on Lower Mainland hospitals.

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