BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN
Two nurse practitioners will ask the city's priorities committee tonight to lobby the province for more funding so they can help care for thousands of patients in the city without a family doctor.
Marilyn Butcher and Roberta Heale say it's almost impossible to find a position in their field in Greater Sudbury. In fact, there are seven local nurse practitioners who are unable to find jobs in the city.
Butcher has been a nurse practitioner for 10 years, but lately, she's been forced to commute to other communities to fill locum positions. Heale teaches in the nurse practitioner program at Laurentian University.
“I've done some research, and a similar situation does not exist in the Sault, North Bay or Thunder Bay. Sudbury is in a rather unique position. I'm not sure why,” says Butcher.
“The reason that we're going to council is that the noise about this has to come from Sudbury. This isn't a province-wide problem. Unless we bring this to the province's attention, we won't get this resolved.”
The women want city council to lobby the province to fund a community clinic managed by nurse practitioners to deliver primary care to patients who don't have family doctors.
They had submitted a proposal for the clinic to the province last year when the government was setting up family health teams, but were rejected in February.
In 2003, the previous Conservative provincial government provided $11 million to fund 117 new nurse practitioner positions, but 40 of those positions were never filled.
The nurse practitioners want council to lobby the province for some of that money to be re-directed to Greater Sudbury.
“Those positions are sitting there unused and wasted. Nobody's accessing health care,” says Butcher, who is also the communications director of the Nurse Practitioners Association of Ontario (NPAO).
“It's unfortunate for those communities, but what we're saying that if in three and a half years you've been unable to recruit, it's time to redistribute some of those positions to medically underserved areas where there are nurse practitioners ready and willing to work.”
Nurse practitioners could solve some of the problems associated with the family doctor shorage in the city because they can do about 80 percent of the work done by physicians, including prescribing drugs and diagnosing illnesses.
“We are able to manage people coming in with more routine, chronic conditions,” says Butcher.
“Situations where we don't provide care is with sick infants under the age of three months, or if somebody has a new onset of a serious illness and they're unstable.”
Butcher, 50, is free to travel where there's work because she no longer has small children at home, but she'd rather work in her own community, especially when there's a need for health care workers.
“There's been a lot of family doctors leave Sudbury. In August there were four. I've had some of their patients call me and say 'Are you working in Sudbury yet because my family doctor left town'.”
Other local nurse practitioners who can't get a job in their field are working as registered nurses or are thinking about leaving Greater Sudbury for greener pastures, she says.
In August, Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO) executive director Doris Grinspun wrote a letter to Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman on behalf of unemployed nurse practitioners in the city.
Sudbury MPP Rick Bartolucci also wrote a letter to Smitherman on their behalf.
