Please join Registered Nurses in their fight to stop Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) from replacing nurses in a scrub nurse role and from cutting RNs from operating rooms!

HHS has adopted a cheaper model of care to deal with the surgical backlog which puts patient safety at risk and cuts nurses from operating rooms.

Patients need nurses to advocate for them when they are most vulnerable. How a patient responds under anesthetic is unpredictable. Patients need nurses who have specialized knowledge, qualifications and are highly skilled to handle medicines being administered by the surgeon, and respond when there are emergencies in surgery (like unexpected bleeding), retract skin and tissue, collect and prepare specimens or biopsies, and maintain a safe sterile surgical environment to prevent infections. Nurses are needed in a scrub nurse role. Surgical patients need the right provider, providing the right care at the right time.

Instead, HHS is replacing the scrub nurse with an unregulated health-care worker. Next they plan to eliminate a circulating RN with a scrub nurse. This means one less Registered Nurse in a patient's surgery.  If this surgical model of care is implemented here, it will spread province-wide. This will result is a increased risk to patient safety in surgeries across Ontario.

Registered Nurses need your support. Now is the time to stand with them as they protect patients and the standard of surgical care in operating rooms.