I am doing my best to stay afloat lately. With a new-to-me vehicle that uses three times as much gas, rent being more than double what it was 5 years ago, hockey fees coming out, and various other unexpected fees, I am doing my best to stay afloat, which is requiring me to work more hours than I should have to.

I digress, I am so fortunate to have a career that allows me to pick up extra shifts as needed with the opportunity for overtime to help make ends meet. Unfortunately, this also means that our healthcare system relies heavily on overtime as you might be finding out with the nursing strike currently underway.

Our strike just means that we stop picking up overtime that is beyond baseline staffing and that we no longer perform duties that are not in our job description. Even with the overtime only being strictly hours meant to help staff the bare minimum nursing shifts… We spend over 2.5 million dollars per day in overtime to fill baseline shifts… Per day.

I know some people love to crap on nurses for working overtime, but if we did not pick up these shifts, patients would suffer and our coworkers would burn out at an increasing rate. The problem is not nurses working overtime; it is the employers not creating a work environment that is more supportive or allows nursing and HCA staff to not leave their shifts feeling like they have provided less-than stellar care. The moral and ethical burnout that happens when we leave a shift knowing that we were unable to provide a level of care we would have liked to is awful. It wears on you. Having to stop nursing care in order to perform duties that belong to other staff (who are not being staffed well enough and who are burning out!) affects patient care negatively.

These duties are things like transcription of orders, acting as a receptionist/answering the phone (there are lots of phone calls!), Retrieving medications from other units/sourcing out medications; ordering labs/sending off requisitions; tying off laundry bags, sourcing out laundry, tying off garbage, finding equipment, etc… If we hire enough allied professionals, we ALL would benefit.