Amanda Rainville, a nurse practitioner and executive director at a rural primary care clinic in Capreol, Ont., says she feels the impact of the wage gap in the community health sector on a daily basis.
Located about 40 kilometres north of Sudbury, the Capreol Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic serves a maxed-out roster of more than 3,200 patients and hasn’t had capacity to accept new patients from its waiting list for two years.
“It’s heartbreaking,” says Rainville, who has worked at the clinic since 2011. “They all need help. They all need health care. But our hands are tied. We physically cannot take in any more patients. We’re struggling to maintain access for the patients that we have currently.”
Like community health-care providers across the province, Rainville’s clinic has experienced an exodus of frontline clinicians leaving for significantly more money to perform similar work with other publicly funded organizations, like hospitals and school boards.
Over the past two years, the entire team of clinicians at the Capreol clinic – aside from Rainville – has left for higher-paying jobs elsewhere, including three nurse practitioners, three nurses, a social worker and a dietician. The clinic is constantly in recruitment mode to fill a revolving door of vacancies.
There are no other primary care providers accepting patients in Capreol or the neighbouring community of Hanmer, which creates high demand and a lot of pressure on Rainville and her colleagues.
“My staff is burnt out. Patients are frustrated because we’ve been having a difficult time recruiting and retaining providers, so our access has really gone down,” Rainville says. “We’re not able to serve our patients with the quality care that we would like to provide them. It’s still quality care. It’s just the access piece that has gone down.”
At the same time as she feels the strain of the current challenges in community health care, Rainville understands why many of her colleagues are tempted to move on to greener pastures where they can earn about 30 per cent more income for similar roles.
“They like our organization, but some of them were working two different jobs to try to make ends meet, so their work-life balance was not great,” she says.
Rainville is hopeful the Ontario government will listen to a growing chorus of calls from the community health sector to close the wage gap and help fix staffing challenges that limit patient access to primary care.
“We’re asking to fix the wage disparity, but it is ultimately so that we can provide the best care for our patients. It’s not about greed, it’s about need,” she says.
