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A study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has had on local nurses and their profession shows that many have left their jobs and others are counting down the days to retirement.
Research began in 2020, when a team of UWindsor researchers interviewed 36 registered nurses working in Windsor or Michigan.
Head researcher Dr. Dana Menard says the pandemic was relatively new and there was still optimism after the first round of interviews.
The latest findings come from 19 interviews one year later.
She says they paint a grim picture.
"Our participants were almost universally exhausted, depressed, burned out, frustrated," she says. "They felt disposable, expendable and a lot of them were really expressing these doubts of fears that things would ever get back to any semblance of normal."
Menard says many nurses felt they could no longer spend adequate time with patients due to understaffing.
"In some cases people told us that managers were working on the floor because so many nurses had left," says Menard. "Not only are they not able to nurse the way they want to, but they feel that things are bursting at the seams where they can't catch their breath and they're feeling like the situation is genuinely unsafe for patients because of understaffing."
She adds the research team became emotional while conducting interviews.
"It was really hard to hear these people who have been giving it everything for a year are feeling very disposable, that's a terrible thing to hear from people who have been making such tremendous sacrifices," she added.
Menard also points to wage disparities between new hires and existing employees as a cause of resentment among nurses.
She says new nurses have been offered signing bonuses and other staff were paid premiums to work in certain areas while very little was spent on retaining existing staff.
The research was funded by the WE-Spark Health Institute - a research partnership with the University, St. Clair College, Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital and Windsor Regional Hospital.
Menard says the findings will be shared with employers and published in academic journals.
