REGINA - The health care system in Newfoundland and Labrador wants you.
That looks to be the message that potential health care recruits in Saskatchewan will be hearing this week, as the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has set up a number of recruiting events to convince people to work in their province as health care professionals.
Starting today, Hon. Tom Osborne, Minister of Health and Community Services, and members of their recruitment team are to be in Saskatchewan travelling to communities.
Meet and greet events with the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and NL Health Services are scheduled for Wednesday evening, Oct. 4 at the Hilton Doubletree in Regina, Thursday evening Oct. 5 at the Coronet Hotel in Prince Albert and Friday evening Oct. 6 at the Sheraton Cavalier Saskatoon, each starting at 7 p.m. Participants are being asked to register online for these events and there are also confidential one-on-one meetings being offered during the day. More details are posted at their website at WorkInHealthNL.ca.
“Newfoundland and Labrador has a lot to offer health care professionals,” said minister Osborne in a statement. “Our financial incentives are among the best in Canada, including up to $450,000 for physicians and up to $100,000 for nurses. We are happy about the results of our recruitment strategy and recognize there is still more work to be done, and we look forward to working with health care professionals who are interested in working in Newfoundland and Labrador.”
The Newfoundland and Labrador recruitment comes on the heels of the Government of Saskatchewan’s own health care recruiting mission going on in Atlantic Canada.
The newly formed Saskatchewan Health Recruitment Agency led by CEO Erin Brady, along with recruiters from the Saskatchewan Health Authority, announced last month they were scheduled to go on an Eastern Canada Recruiting Tour to meet with health care professionals, students and post-secondary institutions in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland from Sept. 22 to Oct. 6.
Among those stops was a visit to Newfoundland and Labrador last week for an early-evening recruiting event in St. John’s on Sept. 28.
In speaking to reporters that same day, minister Osborne made known he was not impressed with Saskatchewan’s recruiting efforts in his own province.
“To be on the ground, doing an aggressive, active recruitment mission with staff, goes a little beyond what I would consider to be acceptable,” Osborne said in a report from Canadian Press.
The decision by the NL government to recruit in Saskatchewan also drew some criticism from the province’s NDP, who issued a news release saying they wanted the government to focus instead on retaining health care professionals.
“Saskatchewan is only recruiting in this province because they have indication that healthcare workers in this province are looking to work in a system where they are respected by their employer, and that’s not Newfoundland and Labrador,” said NDP Leader Jim Dinn, member for St. John’s Centre, in a news release.
“If the Minister of Health was certain that this province was a favourable place to live his response to Saskatchewan would have been ‘Go ahead, try it. Our healthcare workers are here to stay’. While it’s quaint that the Minister of Health has entered into this tit-for-tat sandbox squabble with another province – it’s a waste of government resources being used to distract from the reality that this government is failing to retain workers and show them that Newfoundland and Labrador is a favourable place to work in healthcare.”
In a news release Sept. 27, the Newfoundland and Labrador government touted their own recruitment strategy, which includes more than 40 physicians agreeing to work in the province since the start of the fiscal year April 1, 2023, and over 200 internationally-educated nurses have been recruited to the province. They also touted their 2023 budget’s largest ever investment in health care, with over $23 million in funding for health care recruitment and retention efforts.
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