A topical question if there ever was one, a team from Laval University is launching a new online survey these days to better understand the turnover of nursing staff, a subject that would rarely have been studied until here.
Posted at 10:52 a.m.
Jean-Benoit Legault
The Canadian Press
The research led by Marianne Beaulieu, who is a professor at the Faculty of Nursing at the Quebec university and a researcher at VITAM – Sustainable Health Research Center, will be conducted by surveys among Quebec nursing staff and will follow the evolution of a cohort of nursing staff over a period of three years, until April 2027.
“The nursing staff,” recalled M.me Beaulieu is the largest group of personnel involved within the public network. So if we want to ensure the survival of the public system, we must take care of these people. This is why we are interested in their employment conditions. »
The “Express — Experience of nursing personnel in the health and social services network” project aims to shed light “on this issue of public interest, to support neutral and scientific recommendations, which will help resolve the problems encountered in provincial level, while considering local particularities,” we explained in a press release.
It will be carried out in collaboration with twenty-nine health establishments in the province which, said Mme Beaulieu, agreed to participate with enthusiasm since they are all “interested in the same thing: finding solutions to the issues of vacant positions and staff turnover”, but also because they will be consulted at each stage to determine which will be documented to avoid being “out of step with the field”.
All nursing staff in the Quebec health network are invited, between now and October 31, 2024, to participate in this research project by visiting the “express.quebec” website. The results of the surveys will be made public after each collection.
Mme Beaulieu recognizes that this first deadline of October 31 is “ambitious”, but she points out that her team collaborates with several stakeholders who are interested in the results: establishment management, nursing care management, human resources management and management. communications, but also the executive committees of nurses, the unions and the Order of Nurses of Quebec.
A new thirty-minute questionnaire will be published every six months, for a total of six questionnaires. The first questionnaire concerns the conditions of employment (working hours, workload, participation in decision-making, relationships with colleagues and so on), but also on the conditions of exercise of the profession (are the participants able to practice their profession as they wish?).
“They have a particular profession, we call it a “relational profession”, said Mme Beaulieu. This means that working conditions will have an interaction with the meaning of the work they do, which will interact with satisfaction, then with intentions to leave, mental health, and everything else. »
Those responsible for the project obviously want to be able to count on the participation of as many nursing staff members as possible, in order to be able to paint the most representative portrait of the situation possible. That being said, they hope to recruit at least 22,000 participants by the end of October, which would represent about a quarter of the province’s approximately 80,000 nurses and practical nurses.
Beyond the anecdotes heard and shared, say the researchers, “employment experiences will be rigorously documented and will become reliable data that can support informed decision-making” within the health and social services network.
