Latest agency nursing scoop shows how much we don’t know about the practice

Now we know what at least one health care body is paying per hour to private for-profit staffing agencies. Jeremy Appel has an exclusive story for the Progress Report that we just published that reveals what Covenant Care is paying per hour for staffing agency registered nurses (RNs), licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and even health-care aides (HCAs).

Covenant Care is the continuing care arm of Covenant Health, a Catholic health care provider in Alberta. The organization provides supportive living, long-term care, memory care and hospice care in St. Albert, Beaumont, Calgary, Lethbridge, Edmonton, and Red Deer.

A registered nurse just starting at Covenant Care makes $39.21 an hour. The private, for-profit staffing agency that provides an RN for Covenant Care gets paid $109.68 an hour. For more details on just how much Covenant Care is paying their LPNs and HCAs compared to their collective agreement read the story. 

What the actual agency nurse or health-care aide who is doing the work gets paid Covenant doesn’t know. “As the customer, Covenant Care does not have access to information about how much the agency retains or pays its staff,” said Covenant spokesperson Stephanie Odayen. 

Image via Jonathan Borba/Pexels

The problem of the stealth privatization of Alberta’s healthcare system through the use of private, for-profit staffing agencies is an issue we’ve covered repeatedly at the Progress Report. This latest report brings the total spent by AHS and Covenant Health on private staffing agencies up to nearly $350 million since the 2022-2023 fiscal year. 

We’d love to know what AHS, the largest health care agency in Alberta by a wide margin, pays the staffing agencies that they work with but sadly AHS doesn’t have the necessary data to make those calculations. When we tried to FOIP the same data that we got from Covenant they told us it would cost $72,000 to get it. Apparently AHS is not tracking the amount of hours that staffing agency nurses and health-care aides are working. In order to get that information they would have to have looked at every single invoice from the past year paid to an agency and pulled the hours off of it. 

Bananas. 

AHS paid private, for-profit staffing agencies more than $156 million in 2023-2024 and are on track to pay them just under $100 million this year. But they’re choosing not to disclose what they pay these agencies. And many of them just sprung up, in 2022-2023 there were five AHS was dealing with. The next year there were 21. 

So be on the lookout for our next story on agency nursing where we dig into who these private, for-profit healthcare staffing agencies are. 

Sundries

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