February 24 2024

The existence of for-profit health care staffing agencies is not a new phenomenon. In the past, it was limited to remote locations and emergency staffing shortages. What is new, as revealed by the Globe and Mail’s recent investigation, is that these contracts with for-profit staffing agencies are out of control.

The investigation exposed chaos in health care, stemming from massive labour shortages, and exploitation by for-profit corporations to privatize staffing. Desperate for workers, governments, health authorities, and hospitals have signed contracts allowing agencies to charge extortion-level rates for access to health care professionals lured out of the public system.

None of this is news to those on the front lines of health care. The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), representing 425,000 workers, with 125,000 of them in health care, has been advocating for wise investments and strong national standards. NUPGE and our Components have long opposed health care privatization, because we see its detrimental impacts, including broken promises of improved services and irresponsible management of public funds.

Rather than filling a specific need in health care, these companies are now making the problem worse while claiming to be the solution. The more we contract with these agencies for staffing, the more they pull workers from the public system, driving costs ever higher, all without delivering the care people need. Until governments deal with the staffing crisis in health care, workers will continue to be drawn to the promises of higher pay and more ability to control their hours and work-life balance. The blame lies squarely on governments who did not heed the long-standing calls to invest in the training and retention of health care professionals.

The reality is that there are a limited number of health care professionals. In one example cited by the Globe and Mail, the agency charged about $300 per hour for the worker’s time, a rate six times higher than workers in the public system. Despite the extreme rate, the actual pay received by the nurse was only a fraction of the total amount billed.

But this model’s inefficiency extends beyond the exorbitant costs. Workers report that the effectiveness and cohesiveness of the workplace is undermined due to the temporary nature of agency postings and the need to train the workers for each new assignment.

In a new development, NUPGE members who are specialized health care professionals, such as respiratory technologists, medical lab technologists and imaging specialists are now also being solicited by these agencies. These highly trained Health care professionals are in short supply and the agencies are looking to exploit this demand.  

Health care professionals are under immense stress now exacerbated by shortages that were evident prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic hit, it put additional pressure on already overstretched system, but the expansion of for-profit staffing and delivery of health care services is making the situation even more dire.  

It is safe to say that governments and hospitals as well as long-term care facilities have failed Health care professionals and consequently their patients. This has led directly to where we are today – paying millions more to private agencies that are locking us into an unsustainable cycle of expanding corporate profits away from real investments into public health care.

Everyone involved—health care professionals, patients, the public—deserves better. The solution to this crisis does not lie in for-profit corporations. If these privatization experiments have taught us anything, it is that companies that are focused on profit offer little in terms of addressing health care issues and only serve to weaken the public system.

This is a time for decisive action: robust investments in public health care with stronger coordination and restrictions on the use of private agencies.  We need a national health human resources strategy and additional funding by the federal government. We need workers to have fair compensation, respect, and dignified working conditions to ensure they remain in the public system whose goal is to meet the needs of all Canadians. The cost of inaction is too high. The current crisis in health care is a warning we must heed.