
How a Montreal hospital deals with ongoing staffing shortages
CBC
Florent Verjus and his team at Montreal's Jean-Talon Hospital may not work directly with patients, but they play a crucial role in delivering their care.
Verjus, a former nurse, is the chief of services for the CIUSSS du Nord-De-L'île-De-Montréal. These days, plugging scheduling holes created by the labour shortage is a full-time job at the small, 180-bed hospital.
If the mandatory vaccination order for health-care workers had gone ahead as planned Friday, this weekend would have been "catastrophic," he said.
"We would've had some major issues ... so at least there are people coming back on the floor," he said.
"But I think it's just delaying the problem by a month."
Verjus estimates 15 more nurses, split between the emergency room, medicine and surgery departments, are needed to run the hospital at full capacity — and that's just for this weekend.
He said staffing the ER is always his biggest challenge.