Travel nursing contracts help push Vitalité $98M over budget

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Vitalité Health Network is $97.8 million over budget, with most of that due to costs related to travel nursing contracts.

At its regular board meeting in Campbellton on Tuesday, Réjean Després, co-chair of the Vitalité board, said the health authority would be behind for the first 11 months in its 2023-24 budget, and $94.2 million of it was because of travel nursing.

Després said it was the cost of resources that were needed to replace nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“These costs do not have to do with luxury expenses, and we are continuing to look at them,” he said in French.

Després said on Tuesday the rest of Vitalité‘s operational budget deficit is related to $3.6 million in expenses for small equipment and professional services in laboratory, pharmacy and infrastructure.

“These were unplanned but urgent spending,” he said.

Vitalité said in a response Wednesday there are six active travel nurse contracts. The biggest, with Ontario-based Canadian Health Labs, doesn’t expire until February 2026.

Several other provinces, including Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, signed similar contracts. In some instances, the companies providing the nurses are being paid more than $300 an hour per nurse.

The contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, were signed in 2022 when the regional health authorities were facing major staffing shortages because of the pandemic. Not doing anything would have led to the closure of some health facilities, the government, Vitalité and Horizon Health Network have said.

A few months after Premier Blaine Higgs fired the elected boards, the province had assigned trustees to oversee Horizon and Vitalité. The new board wasn’t in place, and the trustees and senior Horizon and Vitalité executives signed the travel nurse contracts.

Després and Tom Soucy, the board’s other co-chair, told Brunswick News previously that when the contracts were signed, Vitalité needed travel nurses to keep the network running and avoid closing hospitals.

Auditor General Paul Martin is undergoing an investigation into the contracts for both health authorities, as well as the Department of Social Development.

Vitalité said in the statement on Wednesday the Department of Health has been funding overrun costs since the 2022-2023 fiscal year.

“The board is currently having discussions with our colleagues at Department of Health on funding cost overrun in the 2023-2024,” the health authority said.

When asked about the Vitalité shortfall in a scrum on Wednesday, Health Minister Bruce Fitch said: “We just started this year’s budget in April. It was just passed and we did the estimates, so we’re looking forward to first-quarter, second-quarter results just to see if there’s any we can come in on budget without negatively affecting the clinical aspect.”

The department is working with Vitalité to find ways the health authority can alleviate their need for travel nurses, as well as “significant recruitment” going on right now within the department and Vitalité, he said.

“We’re working together. There’s a number of missions that have occurred over the last little while to find people to replace those travel nurses,” Fitch said.

“I know within Horizon and Vitalité there’s a bit of different needs there. Horizon sees an ending in the not too distant future, Vitalité has a longer term challenge, so we’re trying to work through those issues.”

Fitch noted there are fewer francophone nurses available throughout New Brunswick, Canada and globally. The department and Vitalité are specifically targeting places like France, Morocco, Belgium, where the French language is more prevalent.

“They’ve got some of the northern communities, which again are a little bit harder to recruit to. That’s why there are incentives for people to go to those areas and to work in those facilities,” he said.

“We’re working together, we’re trying to figure out a way forward. There’s still some work to do, but we’re moving forward on that.”

Health Department spokesperson Sean Hatchard said in an email the province has been taking steps to train more nurses in New Brunswick. Over the past five years, the number of students enrolled in nursing in New Brunswick has increased from 888 in 2018 to 1,689 this year.

“These New Brunswick nursing graduates will provide additional relief to the regional health authorities to help address nursing shortages in the province,” he said.

– With files from Andrew Waugh