Our Big Brains are continuing to save money by downsizing health care workers without realizing the counterintuitive effect of such downsizing on employees' productivity, employees' quality of life, and quality of health services. And the result is that instead to save money, downsizing is creating more and more social problems, and more and more wastes of money.

Our provincial health care system has become dysfunctional, and there is no research or money which can alleviate the problem of the obsolete mentality of our Big Brains. A recent report from Canada's labour ministry has stated that nurses are absent from work for more than 3 weeks rather than 6 days as for other full-time employees⁽⁵⁾. And Rosalie Longmore, head of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses, has responded to this report by saying that nurses are working too much overtime and that

"If you're working a lot of overtime, your general immune system is run down, nurses are contracting other illness, because they are exhausted."

Longmore has also stated that the only way to improve the health of nurses is to change the work environment. Further, as the CUPE health care strike is reaching his third day, union president Stephen Foley expressed his feeling for the failures of the health system in this way

"Our members are routinely working exhausted, sick, injured, and overtime because there's so much more to do in the health care system and, quite frankly, there's not enough staff to do it... That simply can't continue. Our members simply want a life. SAHO and the provincial government are not going to solve the staff recruitment and retention problem in the health care system until they start caring about the very people that work for them, the health care workers⁽⁶⁾."

And this morning we have the news that 10,000 SEIU health workers could vote as early as next week whether to walk off their jobs at some 11 health care districts⁽⁷⁾. Greg Trew, chief negotiator for the SEIU, says that the main issues are salary, pension, and staff shortages and pointed out that

 "I think we're coming to the end of a process quite frankly... The people that I represent are beyond frustration. They keep being told they're valued, what they do is important -- until it costs a dollar and then they're obviously not much of a priority at all."

Longmore, Foley and Trew are right on in focusing the problems of the health system in the continuous downsizing of our health care workers. And Professor John Sterman writes

"Extended overtime and the fatigue it leads to have many harmful effects. These include decreased alertness and performance on cognitive and other tasks, higher stress, lower job satisfaction, increased injury and accident rates and on and off the job, increased illness, decreased psychological health, increased incidence of substance abuse, higher suicide rates, and higher overall mortality⁽⁸⁾."

References/Endnotes

Relevant political and economics articles http://ensign.ftlcomm.com

1. A Saskatchewan Vision for Health, The Honourable Louise Simard, Minister of Health, Saskatchewan Health, August 1992

2. Pat Atkinson: raising the finger and turning healthcare to a gambling casino, by Mario deSantis, February 3, 2000 http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign/desantisArticles/2000/desantis110/HealthCasino.html

3. Caring for Medicare: Sustaining a Quality System: Saskatchewan Commission on Health Care, full report (chair, Ken Fyke, April, 2001) http://www.marketingden.com/medicare/Commission_on_Medicare-BW.pdf

4. Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada http://www.healthcarecommission.ca/

5. Nurses get ill, injured, more than other workers, CBC Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, June 10, 2001

6. Union wants conciliator's help with health contract talks, CBC Saskatchewan, May 30, 2001 http://sask.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2001/05/30/cupeconcil010530

7. Another health strike looms, CBC Saskatchewan, June 12, 2001 http://sask.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2001/06/12/serv010612

8. Business Dynamics, by John D. Sterman, 2000, page 578 http://www.mhhe.com/sterman