After a shortage of nurses at the Red Deer hospital's Emergency Department caused major delays this past weekend, the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) trade union say they are frustrated the hospitals administration allowed it to get to this point, which led to them filing a grievance.

Director of Labour Relations for the UNA David Harrigan says the amount of extra work current nurses are doing is more than enough to hire additional employees.

“The number of hours in overtime and additional shifts worked in the past 10 weeks, equates to 27 full time positions, and the employer is just not taking it seriously, so we had to file a grievance, we filed a grievance last week… and not to our surprise it hit a crisis on the weekend, like we knew it was going to.”

He thinks the hospital might be looking at short term solutions, when they could solve the issue long term by hiring extra workers, which would save the hospital money.

“I suspect that the way they do their budgeting, is there are budgeted for a certain amount of baseline staff and it’s more difficult to get permission to say ‘I want to hire more staff’, because they look at things in the short term and they say, ‘well hiring staff costs money’, and they don’t look at things in the long term and recognize that yes, it will cost some money but we will save far more than that by no longer having the overtime.”

Alberta Health Services said the shortage was a result of vacant temporary positions not being filled, and nurses moving to other facilities or departments.

Harrigan says the union and representatives from the Red Deer hospital are meeting Thursday to hopefully find a solution to this issue.

His recommendation is for AHS to immediately hire an additional 27 nurses.