GTA hospitals combine recruitment efforts to create team of critical care nurses who can be deployed to fill staffing gaps

Nursing vacancies for GTA hospitals are one of the greatest challenges across the system and in critical care. The four hospitals received support from the Ministry of Health to launch a pilot project to recruit and orient nurses to work across the critical care units of the partner hospitals. Each hospital will recruit five nurses for the team, for a total of 20, who will be trained and orientated to the critical care units across the four organizations. Staffing levels on the units are monitored daily and when a need arises, members of the team can be assigned to work at whichever hospital needs help. When the nurses aren’t needed in other hospitals, they’ll work as a member of the critical care teams in their home institution, where they were recruited initially.