After filing a grievance with the United Nurses of Alberta last month, staff at the Red Deer Regional Hospital is taking more steps to addressing the staff shortages that are causing delays at the emergency department.

The letter follows UNA members at the emergency department working 231.43 hours of overtime between July 20th-22nd, 2018.

The UNA sent a letter to Minister of Health Sarah Hoffman in hopes of coming up with a solution to this ongoing problem.

Director of Labour Relations for the UNA David Harrigan says he doesn't understand why AHS would rather pay overtime to employees instead of hiring new workers and paying people straight time.

“They (AHS) did announce last week that they were going to hire 15 additional nurses, they later told us that wasn’t true, that in fact they were only hiring 6. And even with those 6, they’ve posted a new schedule and there’s going to be a reduction of 1.4 FTE, so certainly it looks like this crisis is just going to continue.”

FTE refers to the full time equivalent, which is the ratio of the total paid hours, by the number of working hours in a period of time.

Harrigan says they felt irked by the apparent mind change from AHS about the number of positings advertised.

“What we said to the Minister is that wasting money on overtime is just bad fiscal management, and ignoring the concerns of the nurses is bad labour relations, but misinforming the public and telling the public that you are hiring 15 additional staff when in fact you’re having fewer staff, brings into question the integrity and the ability of the local management to actually operate a health care system, so we are asking her (Hoffman) to intervene and use her authority to bring some logic to this situation.”

Harrigan says they have a meeting scheduled with the health minsters office next week.