An acute shortage of health-care workers that’s harming both patients and workers is putting front and centre the question of how to solve the problem.
Statistics Canada data shows that job vacancies in health care were almost twice as high in the final quarter of 2021 as they were in the final quarter of 2019, pre-pandemic.
Ivy Bourgeault, a professor in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa, says staffing shortages in health care are a “complex, wicked problem” compounded by poor planning.
“There is no data going to education and training programs in terms of how many seats they should have for dietitians and nurses and physicians and pharmacists, etc. There’s no standardized data for that to happen across the country, so we’ve done a very poor job,” Bourgeault said in an interview….