Health Care Shortage Essay

Today's healthcare system in Canada is being pushed to its limits. Historically high turnover rates, wait times, and burnout are just some of the few issues that plague our hospitals. Some may believe that long wait times are the worst problem that we face in the health care system. Others believe the level of care is inadequate and/or rushed to be the culprit. The truth of the matter is that staffing shortages are the root cause of all of the above. The growing older generation requires more staff to cope with the advancements in healthcare and life spans. We need to alleviate the already existent excessive workloads current staff face, to curb burnout. We also require lowering barriers to education to make education more accessible for future

We are asking our current staff more out of them than ever before and the ramifications are starting to show. Covid protocols under infection control have changed since. We are more aware of what we are doing, and how it can impact patients. Given that, staff are much more likely to call in when they are feeling symptomatic to prevent the spread of the virus within an already compromised population. That causes the people on staff to do the job of multiple people. In a hospital setting, some things need to be done right away throughout the shift. Emergencies occur regularly. It is difficult to manage both scheduled work and deal with emergencies at the same time, especially being understaffed. The current staff is so busy juggling current workloads that the wait times tend to be extensive. This limits the accessibility to health care which is protected under the Canadian Healthcare act. We work within a cohesive system. When one department experiences shortages those effects are felt throughout the entire system and wait times end up dragging out. This often leads to long unpredictable scheduled hours of work and burnout. Healthcare workers, and especially perioperative clinicians seem to be at particular risk for burnout. This may have significant negative personal effects such as substance abuse, broken relationships and even suicide (Hert, 2020). “In spring 2020, the prevalence of

It is now considered the new normal to pursue post-secondary. That leads to an uptick in entrance requirements for healthcare fields. “In 2019, an all-time high of 73% of Canadians aged 25 to 34 had earned a postsecondary qualification compared with 59% in 2000 ”. Lowering the accessibility of education is directly impacting the accessibility to health care here in Canada which is against the Canadian Health Act. Essential careers such as HCAs and CNAs are not incentivized enough. These roles require a lot of laborious work that is needed daily. Healthcare assistant roles are not well paid even though they do a lot of essential tiring work. Wages run as low as $14.00/hr in parts of Canada. (Government of Canada, 2023). Being paid minimum wage gives little to no incentive to take on such a laborious job. We need an expansion of class intake sizes to better suit current and future healthcare needs. We know that we're gonna need more staff than we have today in the future, yet we are still short-staffed currently. Also, a more holistic application process is based away from an academic core. To help the right people get into the field and not be discouraged by ridiculously high entrance requirements. Discourage “everyone” from pursuing post-secondary and provide alternative solutions. Realistically more and more graduates are graduating