‘Undervalued and underappreciated’: Nurse discusses reasons behind grey listing

A nurse who’s been working at Thompson General Hospital in northern Manitoba for more than a decade is expressing concern over increased violence in and around the hospital over the last few years.

“We’re always on heightened alert,” said the nurse who CTV News agreed not to identify over fears of repercussions.

“The chaos ebbs and flows,” they said. “We have quite a bit of systemic barriers that contribute to the current chaos that we do have within in our hospital, especially being a rural isolated community with no government support.”

The nurse adds that no one “really knows what they are entering into when they go into work.”

“That violence can come in many forms on a day-to-day shift, whether it be verbal, emotional, physical, weapon-based,” they said.

“On the rare occasion, it can be sexual assault towards nurses, but it comes in all forms every day and sadly it is the expectation that we are to take the form of abuse while expected to deliver the most compassionate and high standard of care.”

And this is something that they have experienced while working inside the hospital, the nurse said.

The nurse says some patients enter the hospital with weapons.

“I wouldn’t say the intent is necessarily to harm us, but with the crime rates and what is happening in our community, they will often just carry weapons.”

“There was a situation where I almost accidently stabbed myself in the abdomen area with a knife, because it was under a patient when I was transferring them,” they said. “And that’s a risk every day.”

The nurse said it’s unacceptable, and something needs to change.

“Coming to work every day as a nurse means facing the fear of the unknown for our own safety,” they said. “We as Manitoba nurses aim to provide the best, compassionate, high-quality care we could provide, but the reality is that a broken system often keeps us from giving patients what they truly deserve.”

Nurses overwhelmingly vote in favour of grey listing Thompson’s hospital

A grey listed facility is one in which union members are discouraged from working due to workplace safety concerns. This could include incidents of violence or understaffing.

The Manitoba Nurses Union (MNU) voted 97 per cent in favour of grey listing the facility in Thompson, which is the biggest hospital in northern Manitoba.

This follows two separate incidents over the last year. The first was a shooting inside the hospital’s chapel on Christmas Eve in 2024, and the other, which saw a patient stabbed inside the facility.

The majority vote comes only three months after nurses at Manitoba’s largest hospital, HSC, voted 94 per cent in favour to grey list that hospital.

Grey listing sends clear message: MNU

MNU president Darlene Jackson said the safety of nurses, other health care professionals and patients at the hospital are at risk.

“For months, nurses in Thompson have been raising urgent concerns about violence, chronic understaffing, forced overtime, and unsafe patient loads,” she said in a statement to CTV News. “Despite repeated attempts to work collaboratively with the employer, these issues have not been addressed in any meaningful or sustained way.”

“Grey listing sends a clear message: the status quo is unacceptable,” she said.

The nurse CTV News spoke to said they voted in favour to grey list, because issues nurses in Thompson have been experiencing and raising to government, have been falling on deaf ears.

“It was more of a political strategy, as a last resort to failed advocacy on all levels with the employer and government, with the same broken promises, to say, ‘Hey government, we are here. We need funding and resources, and you need to support us,’” they said.

Hospital grey listing rare in Canada

Kimberly Leblanc, president of the Canadian Nurses Association, says the two hospitals in Manitoba are the first to take this step.

“Those nurses are really courageous,” she said. “It’s a big step to grey list a hospital, but I think that really speaks to the moral distress those nurses were facing and how unsafe they felt.”

Leblanc believes this latest step will give nurses the confidence across the country to eventually follow suit.

“This is going to empower other nurses and health-care professionals, because the violence is not limited to nurses alone,” she said. “But I think you’re going to find health-care settings across the country now saying, ‘We are going to stand up as well and we are not going to tolerate verbal or physical violence in the workplace.’”

Violence against nurses and other health-care workers is something that Leblanc says should not be tolerated.

“If you were to assault a police officer or any safety officer, that would be not tolerated,” she said. “I think it should be the same for all health-care workers.”

“It should be known that it is not okay to physically or verbally abuse health care providers.”

Manitoba nurse student concerned about violence

Vladimir Alvarez is a second-year nursing student at the University of Manitoba.

He says he has been closely following all the news surrounding violence in and around Manitoba hospitals, which is unsettling for him.

“I think it can be discouraging for nurses finding a job,” he said. “It still is a concern that I would think about, and I would possibly reconsider upon like getting a job in one of these places.”

Alvarez himself has been a victim of violence. He was stabbed twice on a downtown bus near HSC in April.

Now, violent incidents like the ones he is seeing from local hospitals, does not go past Alvarez.

“I think it can damage the structure for sure, which is concerning to me,” he said. “It is important that we have these nurses and that we have people that feel safe coming to these communities. I want to see more preventative measures.”

‘Constant level of unease’

Like Alvarez, the nurse CTV News spoke to also wants to see preventative measures taken.

“First and foremost, would be the implementation of Institutional Safety Officers (ISO). We do need peace officers within our facility,” they said.

And the lack of support, the nurse said, makes it difficult for them to do their job.

“The unpredictability and the lack of support, it just creates this level of anxiety,” they said. “We do support each other, but unfortunately we do not have the support necessarily from the government or from upper management within our organization.”

“Our intent every day is not to provide the substandard and subpar care that we see every day in all the provinces in Canada,” they said. “I wish, autonomously as nurses, we had the power to tell the public what we endure every day, because I genuinely feel that if the public were in the know, there would be more empathetic and understanding towards us.”

A spokesperson from Northern Health Region (NHR), which oversee the Thompson General Hospital, tells CTV News that Institutional Safety Officer (ISO) roles are actively being recruited for and will be implemented at the Thompson General Hospital.

These roles will work closely with the newly created Regional Manager of Security, who will begin their role on December 1, 2025.

There will also be infrastructure upgrades including ‘increased secure access measures.’