Nursing Matters: Proposing more health care providers (Ci-dessous la version française)
In recent election campaign promises, both the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party have announced initiatives to make more health-care providers available to all Canadians.
The Liberal Party proposes adding 1,000 new family doctors. To help ensure Canadian families are able to access a family physician and get the care they need, it proposes to invest $100 million over the next five years to bring on stream 1,000 new family doctors.
To assist in the education of Canadians, which will also help nursing students, the Liberals announced a new 50/50 plan under which the government will pay for half of an undergraduate student's first year tuition, and half of a student's graduating year tuition.
For their part, the NDP put forward a health-care provider training fund sufficient to fund the equivalent of another 16,000 nursing training spaces. Money will be used to increase enrolment in Canadian health science education programs, including postgraduate training positions. Nurses will be an important focus, including skills upgrading to encourage the wide use of nurse practitioners.
For nurses, the issue of shortages has been of prime concern. For example, in 2005 the Canadian Cancer Society estimated that 149,000 Canadians would be newly diagnosed with cancer that year. However, statistics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information show no significant increase in the number of nurses working in oncology in the past five years. The increasing incidence of cancers, the lack of new nurses and the anticipated retirements of others mean that Canadians will continue to wait for access to cancer treatment.
There are simply not enough full-time positions in nursing. An increase in admissions to nursing schools is a great start toward bringing the graduate levels back up to where they were in the early 90s. However, without a corresponding increase in full-time positions for nurses, nurses will head south of the border where there actually are full-time jobs. The United States predicts a shortage of 1 million RNs by 2020; our predicted shortage of 113,000 RNs by 2016 pales in comparison. An increased number of seats also does nothing to solve issues of lack of clinical placements, workload, illness, and absenteeism.
On this important matter make your voice heard by attending all-candidates debates, by questioning candidates about what they will do to resolve health issues, by writing letters to the editors of local papers and by getting out on election day to vote for the candidates most committed to supporting nursing issues.
For more information about the election, seeURL See
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In recent election campaign promises, both the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party have announced initiatives to make more health-care providers available to all Canadians.
The Liberal Party proposes adding 1,000 new family doctors. To help ensure Canadian families are able to access a family physician and get the care they need, it proposes to invest $100 million over the next five years to bring on stream 1,000 new family doctors.
To assist in the education of Canadians, which will also help nursing students, the Liberals announced a new 50/50 plan under which the government will pay for half of an undergraduate student's first year tuition, and half of a student's graduating year tuition.
For their part, the NDP put forward a health-care provider training fund sufficient to fund the equivalent of another 16,000 nursing training spaces. Money will be used to increase enrolment in Canadian health science education programs, including postgraduate training positions. Nurses will be an important focus, including skills upgrading to encourage the wide use of nurse practitioners.
For nurses, the issue of shortages has been of prime concern. For example, in 2005 the Canadian Cancer Society estimated that 149,000 Canadians would be newly diagnosed with cancer that year. However, statistics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information show no significant increase in the number of nurses working in oncology in the past five years. The increasing incidence of cancers, the lack of new nurses and the anticipated retirements of others mean that Canadians will continue to wait for access to cancer treatment.
There are simply not enough full-time positions in nursing. An increase in admissions to nursing schools is a great start toward bringing the graduate levels back up to where they were in the early 90s. However, without a corresponding increase in full-time positions for nurses, nurses will head south of the border where there actually are full-time jobs. The United States predicts a shortage of 1 million RNs by 2020; our predicted shortage of 113,000 RNs by 2016 pales in comparison. An increased number of seats also does nothing to solve issues of lack of clinical placements, workload, illness, and absenteeism.
On this important matter make your voice heard by attending all-candidates debates, by questioning candidates about what they will do to resolve health issues, by writing letters to the editors of local papers and by getting out on election day to vote for the candidates most committed to supporting nursing issues.
For more information about the election, seeURL See
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