Image
Featured policy documents
- Nursing Through Crisis: A Comparative Perspective
- Climate Change Position Statement
- RNAO’s letter to the College of Nurses of Ontario regarding IENs
Nursing Through Crisis: A Comparative Perspective
RNAO carried out a detailed survey from May to July 2021, during the height of Ontario’s third wave. Responses from 5,200 Canadian nurses, most of them from Ontario, were analyzed and compared with the association’s earlier Work and Wellbeing Survey Results report, as well as with similarly focused national and international surveys that examined the struggles of nurses working throughout the pandemic.
Image
Climate Change Position Statement
The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) recognizes that climate change is an immediate and growing threat to human health. We are in the midst of a climate emergency. Around the world, weather disturbances are causing historic droughts, raging wildfires and severe population dislocation. Temperatures are rising faster in Canada than the global average. By 2020, Canada was 1.8°C hotter than it was in 1948.1 Human activities are driving this climate change, mainly by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG).
The fight against climate change demands urgent and sustained action from international, national and sub-national levels of government to mitigate a looming humanitarian catastrophe.
Image
RNAO’s letter to the College of Nurses of Ontario regarding IENs
In the midst of Ontario’s worse nursing crisis, thousands of internationally-educated nurses (IEN) living in Ontario remain unable to practise as their applications with the College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) languish for years.
RNAO has called on the CNO to immediately address the backlog of more than 20,000 IEN applications eager to join Ontario’s workforce at a time of dire need.
RNAO has long urged the CNO to adopt a more streamlined approach to process applications. The association’s call for immediate action took on added urgency when it learn of a new program offering work to IENs in the long-term care sector as unregulated health providers. In a letter addressed to the CNO’s CEO Anne Coghlan, Dr. Doris Grinspun stated the Long-Term Care Staffing Pool Program is “exploiting this pool of skilled applicants as a reserve of lesser-skilled labour in a time of crisis is unhelpful and shortsighted … a disservice to Ontarians in desperate need of nurses for both COVID and non-COVID-related health care.”
The letter urges the CNO to expedite IEN applicants so they can take their rightful place as members of Ontario’s nursing profession. RNAO says the college owes IEN applicants and Ontarians at large, an explanation for its painfully slow assessment system, especially at a time there is critical RN understaffing across the province.
READ LETTER
