Public flying team: up to five nurses per accommodation

Nurses on the flying teams created by Christian Dubé to help the Côte-Nord and Abitibi-Témiscamingue are encountering unattractive accommodation conditions.

On the North Shore, the lack of housing forces public volunteers to live in shared accommodation, particularly because several facilities are still occupied by employees of private agencies.

“There are shared accommodations with four, five, six people who are on different shifts. So it’s difficult to rest,” says Élisabeth Gagnon-Tremblay, president of the Union of Nursing and Cardiorespiratory Care Professionals at CHU Sainte-Justine (CSN).

After verification, the CISSS de la Côte-Nord confirms that “some units” of housing do indeed have four or five bedrooms.

The union therefore demanded padlocks to bar the bedroom doors.

The cleanliness of certain accommodations also left something to be desired when the volunteers arrived, underlines M^me Gagnon-Tremblay.

No TV or wi-fi

His words are reminiscent of those of another nurse from the flying team, who left Montreal to help out in Abitibi-Témiscamingue last summer.

«[…] the accommodation where I spent my first night was really non-functional. No microwave, no toaster, no household products, nothing to wash the dishes, there wasn’t even a cauldron [pour] make soup. No television, radio or wi-fi. The wardrobes were full of junkbedding only for one room (there were two of us and that’s a completely different story),” the young man, who did not wish to be identified, wrote on Facebook.

He was finally able to move the next day to a better furnished apartment, but still without Internet.

Another person deployed in Abitibi-Témiscamingue says he had to wait more than two hours outside the accommodation he had been assigned because no one was there to give him the keys, all after a five-hour journey through the La Vérendrye wildlife reserve.

This person, however, assures that their accommodation is ultimately completely adequate. Same story for the beneficiary attendants represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, despite some initial pitfalls.

Unattractive

For Élisabeth Gagnon-Tremblay, accommodation conditions are only part of the irritants her members face.

Photo Agence QMI, JOEL LEMAY

According to her, health establishments continue to offer the best hours to the staff of private agencies.

Employers are also reluctant to allow nurses to maximize their time by working multiple shifts. “What is attractive, when you work as an agency in a remote region, is to leave for a month and come back for a month, to condense two months of work into one,” explains the union leader.

Worse, nurses have to pay out of pocket during these rest days spent away from home. “People on the public flying team do not receive meal per diems when they are on leave,” says M^me Gagnon-Tremblay.

“It’s not a very attractive project for people in the public,” concludes M.^me Gagnon-Tremblay.

Moreover, the public flying team has only attracted 152 employees to date, and some have since been able to leave, as Santé Québec points out. We are still far from the 500 people that the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, wanted to see deployed starting this summer.