Nurse practitioner Beth Cowper-Fung said recruiting employees for her community-based clinic is no longer easy.
Cowper-Fung is the director of the Georgina Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic, offering a variety of health services to the community, from wellness checkups to chronic disease management.
But Cowper-Fung said they have become challenged by a wage gap between clinics like theirs and hospitals.
“It’s getting dire at this point,” Cowper-Fung said, adding that wage increases brought to the sector by provincial Bill 124 have not transferred to them. “At this point, anyone working at my clinic can make many, many, many per cent higher working in a hospital setting.”
Health associations across the province are calling for the province to find a way to bridge a wage gap between community care and other settings. Ten community-based provincial health associations from different health-care areas have launched the “For Us. For You” campaign this month calling attention to wage disparity and asking the province to address it.
The associations estimate community health workers face a combined wage gap of over $2 billion compared to peers doing similar work in publicly funded settings like hospitals and schools.
“This growing wage gap is causing unprecedented staffing shortages, impacting the care Ontarians rely on,” the associations said in a news release.
Associations taking part include Addictions and Mental Health Ontario, AdvantAge Ontario, Alliance for Healthier Communities, Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario, Canadian Mental Health Association Ontario, Children’s Mental Health Ontario, Family Service Ontario, Indigenous Primary Health Care Council, Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic Association and Ontario Community Support Association.
Cowper-Fung said the gap makes hiring much harder, with clinics like hers lucky to get one or two applicants for some spots. She said clinics like these remain important to provide the care Ontarians need closer to home.
“If we don’t have the numbers in the community, we wouldn’t be able to keep them out of the hospital,” she said.”How do we keep the care closer to home? How do we keep that work in the community where people can access easily without transportation and parking costs and get the care they need to receive?”
The associations want the province to invest $500 million each year over the next five years to close the wage gap, in addition to ongoing annual increases to meet inflation.
“The community mental health and addictions workforce continues to struggle with staff retention and difficulty attracting new workers at a time when there is a surge in demand for our services,” Canadian Mental Health Association Ontario CEO Camille Quenneville said in a news release. “Meanwhile, the wage gap for the community health sector continues to grow. Our staff deserve to be paid an equivalent living wage as that of their counterparts in health and other sectors so that they can focus on providing quality care for Ontarians.”
Cowper-Fung said they hope the gap can be addressed over multiple years to make it more manageable for the government. She noted with the province starting a new group to ensure every Ontarian has a primary care provider, nurse practitioners should get consideration in that.
“We need to see the gap shorten so that we can actually make that activate happen,” she said. “We need to be able to increase primary care’s funding appropriately so we can get the great teams out into the community to do the work that they do.”
