Watchdog should probe travel nurse contracts: Higgs

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Premier Blaine Higgs says the auditor general should investigate the contracts signed to bring travel nurses into the province, and that he was unaware of how much money was being paid until recently.

While acknowledging that he was aware of the staffing struggles the Horizon and Vitalité health networks were facing, Higgs said he wasn’t personally aware of the details of the contracts.

The length of the contracts, and the years-long obligations they put on Vitalité to keep using travel nurses, is what particularly bothers the premier.

“What the issue here is, is a contract signed (that is) more or less a three-year take-or-pay contract,” Higgs said on Tuesday. “So basically, a range, a certain level of travel nurses that we’d have to hire for a period of three years.

“We want a decline in this travel nurse concept. We want our own nurses working full time, and having a work-life balance, so that’s part of why we did it at the beginning, because we needed more nurses, not just pay more for the same numbers. And the only way to access more numbers was through a travel nurse program.”

Horizon hopes to stop using travel nurses by some time in spring, Higgs said. It pays hourly rates of $135 per specialized registered nurse, $125 for a registered nurse and $95 for a licensed practical nurse, according to Margaret Melanson, Horizon’s interim president and CEO.

Vitalité is a very different story, and Higgs said “it should be understood” how its contracts were signed, “how it was approved, and why we would sign.” He later added that “maybe the auditor general should (do) a review of it as well.”

Asked what consequences Vitalité’s leadership should face – particularly if its leaders didn’t share all the details with its board of directors – Higgs said “that’s a good question, because you have to have responsibility for taxpayers’ dollars.”

The boards of Horizon and Vitalité will need to meet with the RHAs’ CEOs and “see what corrective action is needed, both in process, and the reality of what we’ve experienced right here.”

A recent investigation by the Globe and Mail revealed that Vitalité signed three deals, worth a total of up to $158 million, to hire travel nurses and personal support workers through Canadian Health Labs (CHL), a Toronto-headquartered health human resources firm, in 2022.

In the two contracts totalling $138 million, Vitalité agreed to pay CHL more than $300 per hour for each travel nurse supplied, according to copies of the agreements obtained by the Globe.

Vitalité’s first contract, which was in effect from Aug. 1, 2022, to Sept. 30, 2023, was for a maximum of $20 million. That deal saw CHL provide registered nurses and licensed practical nurses at a rate of $300.72 an hour to Vitalité’s 11 hospitals.

The second contract, in effect from Nov. 21, 2022, to May 31, 2024, is capped at $45 million. It is for CHL personal support workers – at a rate of $162.29 an hour – for both Vitalité hospitals and Social Development facilities.

And the third contract, in effect from Dec. 5, 2022, to Feb. 5, 2026, has a maximum of $93 million. It provides RNs and LPNs at a rate of $306.70 an hour.

The Globe and Mail found CHL travel nurses make between $85 and $100 an hour – a far cry from the range of $37.56 to $45.67 an hour for a registered New Brunswick nurse.

Opposition reacts

Liberal Leader Susan Holt said it’s hard to believe Higgs, who has “a tendency to micromanage,” wouldn’t be aware of the contract details.

“His own deputy minister of health said this is the kind of thing that gets in front of the premier, a contract of this magnitude,” Holt said. “It’s unusual that the premier’s micromanagement didn’t reach here.

“But the bigger picture here is that nurses are feeling that they’re not valued and that they’re not heard, and this contract is just another slap in the face for them.”

But she supports his call for the auditor general to investigate.

Green party Leader David Coon touched on similar themes, saying the premier has shown a lack of “respect” for New Brunswick’s nurses for years. As an example, he cited the government’s refusal to offer nurses retention bonuses, a move that’s already been made by Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

And while Higgs might not have been aware of the specifics of the contracts, Coon said he was “certainly aware of the increasing reliance on travel nurses.”

– With files from Barbara Simpson