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Some days when Krishna comes home from a shift he looks in the mirror and asks himself, “why did I choose to be a nurse?”
After three years working in a hospital in the Ottawa Valley, he says he’s burning out and thinking of leaving nursing entirely. He spoke to The Grind on the condition only his middle name be used, as he fears repercussions at work.
The burnout is the result of what he calls “a dramatic staffing shortage” in Ontario’s health care system. Sometimes there’s only one nurse to care for nine patients at a time, which is considered unsafe.
Krishna describes working up to eight hours without being able to stop for a break.
He’s not alone. Four in 10 nurses plan to leave their job, leave the profession, or retire in the next year, according to a 2024 survey by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions.
Low pay, unmanageable workloads and declining quality of health care have led four out of five nurses surveyed to show clinical symptoms of burnout.
And patient care suffers. Wait times in his hospital’s emergency room can last up to 14 hours, Krishna says. Sometimes people in medical distress avoid coming in at all.
Low pay, unmanageable workloads and declining quality of health care have led four out of five nurses surveyed to show clinical symptoms of burnout.
Last spring, Krishna’s hospital warned patients to expect longer-than-usual wait times due to a shortage of staff.
Emergency rooms in neighbouring towns sometimes closed their doors overnight.
When patients finally came to the hospital, they were in a bad state.
Especially since COVID, Krishna says, “everybody walking into the hospital has to get a really intense treatment.”
Public hospitals got a budget increase of just 0.5 per cent in 2023-24. That’s effectively a cut. When inflation rises faster than budgets, like in 2023-24, economists call it a “real-dollar cut.”
In that same time, funding for for-profit clinics tripled. A report by the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) found these clinics got over $120 million in 2023-24.
The OHC’s executive director, Natalie Mehra, says that “since staff are the biggest cost in hospitals, if you run the funding at less than the rate of inflation, there’s no choice but to downsize. You couldn’t explain why they would keep the funding for hospitals so low unless they were purposely trying to drive them into the ground to privatize.”
Krishna says he and his coworkers often talk about leaving nursing. “I was talking to my wife the other day, like, ‘I just need to find some other job — occupational health nurse or working an office desk job or something.’ Some days it feels really hectic, just too much.”
