With the Canadian healthcare system struggling amid the flu pandemic, staff shortages, and labor shortages, the role of nurses has become more important than ever - but more needs to be done to retain and support nurses.

A new report released Thursday by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU), called Continuing Nursing in Canada, listed solutions that could help address the nursing shortage during this dire situation in Canada’s healthcare system.

Linda Silas, president of CFNU, said in a press release: "From emergency room closures to children’s hospitals overflowing with sick kids, healthcare is at the breaking point in every corner of the country. At the heart of this crisis is a severe shortage of nurses. After years of ongoing underfunding and the pressure from COVID-19, they urgently need real change and support."

Also among the challenges facing nurses in today’s Canadian healthcare system are chronic shortages, ongoing burnout, overtime, poor mental health, and working conditions, according to the report.

To address the problem and retain more nurses in the field, the report laid out a "multi-layered" strategy with three steps: retention and support, integration, and recruitment and mentorship. The solutions in the report are among the suggestions made during discussions between federal, provincial, and territorial health ministers at a two-day meeting in Vancouver last week.

But the health ministers left the meeting without commitments on new federal funding. A statement issued by Canada’s premiers said there was no "progress" regarding the ongoing call to increase the federal share of healthcare costs to provinces and territories from 22 percent to 35 percent.

Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos claimed at a separate press conference afterward that premiers stopped the talks by not allowing health ministers to accept any conditions from the federal government during the discussions.

Also, the CFNU expressed disappointment in its Thursday press release over the lack of new agreements on how jurisdictions can provide relief and support to nurses. Dr. Ivy Lynn Burgoldt, a University of Ottawa researcher who wrote the CFNU report, said in the statement: "There is no time for political games - the health of Canadians, and in some cases, their lives, are at stake."

The CFNU report stated that the first step to addressing the nursing shortage and issues in Canada should be focusing on strategies that will retain and support the current workforce in the workplace. The report suggested solutions could include reducing workloads, enhancing safe and healthy work environments, supporting nurses' mental health, and using retention strategies targeting specific populations within nursing.

Although nurse practitioners are among the fastest growing groups of healthcare professionals, according to a report released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), many nurses are leaving public health while numbers increase in the private care sector. Between the first and second years of the pandemic, more than 600 registered practical nurses and licensed long-term care or community health agency nurses left, according to the CIHI report. This was a 2.2 percent overall decrease among nurses in long-term care alone.

Similarly, the same report found that inpatient nursing services accounted for more than 9,770,000 hours of additional employee overtime in 2020-2021, and that 27 percent of nurses were consistently logging overtime.

A report from Statistics Canada examining the impact of the pandemic on workers found that 92 percent of nurses reported feeling more stressed at work - a higher percentage than any other healthcare profession, with the next group being physicians at 87 percent.

More than 45 percent of healthcare workers surveyed by StatCan said their mental health was worse in 2021 than before the pandemic.

Additionally, the CFNU also reported in their survey that they surveyed over 4,400 practicing nurses in the 2022 national survey and found that 45 percent of nurses suffer from severe burnout, up from 29 percent pre-pandemic.