Health board provides incentives

Noel Thompson works in the hospital pharmacy at the Central Newfoundland Regional Health Centre. Her days are busy with packaging prescriptions for patients in the hospital.

Trying to retain, attract pharmacists

By JENNIFER PELLEY
nor'wester

Last week, hospital administrators at Central Health announced they would be offering its pharmacists the same incentives announced by the largest health board in the province the previous week.

Hospital pharmacists in central have been offered a temporary annual bonus of $12,000 which will be paid out to them in lump sum payments every six months with the expectation the pharmacists will remain working in the hospital for the next six months. This happened after the provincial government turned pharmacists down for an increase in pay. It is a short-term solution that will last for 18 months until the end of the current contract.

“The first feeling we had was relief that the pressure was taken off,” said Denise O’Brien, clinical pharmacist II at the Central Newfoundland Regional Health Centre. “Then it was pleasure that there was some reward for loyalty and experience, which is often not the case with government. They’ll recruit instead of retaining.”

Administrators came up with the proposal in order to address the rising concern with shortages in hospital pharmacies. Central Health currently has three vacancies that it has not been able to fill for a number of months.

“We have posted the vacancies and have had no applicants,” said Trudy Stuckless, vice-president of professional standards. “The idea of the $12,000 is to retain those we have and to help recruit into the vacant positions.”

Ms. O’Brien said several of these positions have been posted for a couple of years without any response. She pointed out there is one position in St. John’s that has been on offer for 70 months without any applications.

Hospital pharmacy services operate out of the Central Newfoundland Regional Health Centre in Grand Falls-Windsor, where there are currently eight pharmacists, and the James Paton Memorial Hospital in Gander, where there are currently five. The three vacancies are at the Gander hospital.

Hospital pharmacists service the whole region, including nursing homes, providing an essential service.

But the private sector is more attractive to pharmacists because of the substantially higher wages (often about $30,000 a year higher) and the often better benefits packages. About 85 per cent of the province’s pharmacists work in the private sector.

And now with hospitals in the other three Atlantic provinces offering wages and benefits to pharmacists that are comparable to the private sector, Newfoundland hospital pharmacists who are committed to hospital work are realizing they do not even have to leave Atlantic Canada to receive better pay.

Eastern Health’s announcement that it would pay an extra $12,000 for pharmacists who agree to not leave their jobs raised an issue with the Association of Allied Health Professionals (which represents pharmacists) regarding the potential for a drain on other health boards across the province.

Sharon King, executive director of the association, spoke out last week and said other boards would probably be concerned because they were at a higher risk of losing their pharmacists to the Eastern board because of the new incentive.

But Ms. Stuckless said Central Health’s decision was not spurred by Eastern Health’s announcement and a fear of losing its pharmacists. She said the four health boards in the province had discussed how to address the shortage and maintain services together prior to Eastern Health’s announcement, but timing played a factor in when the boards could make their own individual announcements.

“Each health authority had to have discussions with their executive team and with the board of trustees, because this was a significant decision and a unique situation,” she said. “Each health authority needed to go through the process of having those discussions and I think it was just a matter of scheduling.”

Ms. Stuckless also said the health authorities were trying to be consistent in their approach to deal with this concern so a problem does not arise with pharmacists opting to leave one health board for another.

Ms. O’Brien confirmed this was indeed an issue for Central Health pharmacists once Eastern Health made its announcement.

“There were almost immediate discussions about it that said if we don’t get the same, Clarenville (which falls under Eastern Health) has openings,” she said. “People were willing to live in Clarenville. People who don’t particularly want to live in St. John’s could easily have moved there.

“And then there were also some discussions where if the offer was so much better in St. John’s, people could consider that.”

Ms. O’Brien said now that the offer is there, it provides more of an incentive for Central Health pharmacists to stay where they are.

But she pointed out that in 18 months, there will be many eyes on government, watching how it will manage the pharmacist shortage.

“So in 18 months, we are either going to be adopting the same situation again, or government could take these 18 months to come up with some kind of creative solution to resolve this for the long term,” she said.

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