For the previous 12 months, Ellen Gretsinger, a nurse practitioner in Ontario’s Niagara area, has been offering sufferers with medically assisted deaths – and never getting paid for it.
She has a full-time nursing job and a aspect gig providing digital care, and within the evenings and on weekends, assesses sufferers for medical help in dying – generally known as MAID – and delivers the process.
Like many provinces, Ontario doesn’t have a mechanism for nurse practitioners to tackle unbiased work and be paid for it, like a fee-for-service construction usually in place for docs.
And demand for MAID is rising throughout the nation. So Gretsinger does the work totally free. She believes in it, particularly after watching her mom endure earlier than she died of most cancers.
“I just feel that when people are suffering, and this is something that they’ve been told that they can access, then access needs to be there,” Gretsinger mentioned in a latest interview. “So that’s why I have decided to do as much as I can.”
The variety of docs and nurse practitioners out there to manage MAID in Canada has not stored up with growing demand.
A report final month from Health Canada reveals the variety of MAID suppliers has grown by a median of 18 per cent every year, however the variety of medically assisted deaths – sometimes called provisions – has grown by practically 33 per cent every year. According to federal regulation, MAID provisions and assessments will be achieved by nurse practitioners or docs, and every request should be assessed by a minimum of two suppliers.
There are a bunch of the explanation why medical professionals might not be taking up MAID requests, from overwork in a strained system to hesitancy about MAID itself, mentioned Dr. Tim Holland, head of bioethics at Dalhousie University. He considers medically assisted dying to be the most important cultural shift associated to drugs since abortion.
But there are nurse practitioners like Gretsinger who’re wanting to tackle the work.
“Finding a model that will allow nurse practitioners to be able to do this, in addition to their standard practice, would go a long way to increase capacity,” Holland mentioned in an interview. “Every time we have a MAID conference, (the question) comes up every time ? ‘How are we all going to advocate to get nurse practitioners paid?’”
Stan Marchuk, president of the Nurse Practitioner Association of Canada, mentioned he’s conscious of “a number” of nurse practitioners who’re doing unpaid MAID work.
“I think it speaks to the fact that we just don’t have good compensation mechanisms in Canada for nurse practitioners,” he mentioned in a latest interview. “We need more flexible models of compensation to allow nurse practitioners to be able to practice to their full scope in Canada.”
Compensation fashions for nurse practitioners have remained largely unchanged for many years, regardless of vital improvements in drugs and reforms to well being programs, Marchuk mentioned. In most provinces, nurses are salaried and tethered to well being authorities, with no method to be compensated for work achieved outdoors their jobs.
Doctors, in the meantime, invoice well being authorities for any work they do, Marchuk mentioned, including that his group is pushing for extra versatile compensation fashions that might enable nurse practitioners to supply extra companies – and even arrange unbiased practices offering MAID assessments and provisions.
“I think it’s really shameful that ? people are providing a service for which they’re not being compensated,” he mentioned.
British Columbia has made headway in providing completely different compensation fashions, and Alberta is within the strategy of figuring it out, Marchuk added.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, nurse practitioners can file as much as 5 further hours to do a MAiD evaluation or provision outdoors of normal work shifts. It’s a brand new rule, a part of the collective settlement between registered nurses and the provincial authorities, which was signed in July. Before that, nurse practitioners had been doing the work totally free, on their very own time, simply as Gretsinger is, mentioned Yvette Coffey, president of Newfoundland and Labrador’s registered nurses’ union.
“They saw the need,” Coffey mentioned in a latest interview. “And at the end of the day, it’s the needs of the patients that trump everything else.”
Gretsinger mentioned she’d wish to see Ontario well being officers provide nurse practitioners a billing code for the work she does on medically assisted dying. Until then, she’ll preserve going. She worries that if she turns down these requests for assessments, sufferers would endure longer. She mentioned a girl needed to alter her desired day to die 4 occasions as a result of it was onerous to seek out suppliers.
“She suffered for another two months,” Gretsinger mentioned. “It breaks my heart.”
© 2023 The Canadian Press
Some Canadian nurse practitioners not being paid for MAID administration
