Date: 2007
Location: Edmonton
Profile: Michelle Senkow started her nursing career in 1977 in Calgary before working in several other locations, including Grande Prairie and 12 years at Edmonton’s Misericordia Hospital. She returned to Calgary in 2000. Most of her nursing career was in Maternal Child Nursing Care, but she has also worked in surgery and medicine.
Senkow brings her lens as a nurse, a union activist, and mother of 5 children to serving as a UNA mentor to other nurses. She has dealt with nurses facing many workplaces challenges, including emotional blackmail to work past the point of exhaustion, unsafe working conditions such as toxic mould, and an inability to provide adequate care in situations of understaffing. Senkow laments that inadequate government funding and inappropriate pressures from nursing managers are pushing nurses out of the profession. A strong advocate of public healthcare, she decries the fact that inadequate funding of the public care system means that the wealthy can get MRIs, CatScans, and other services quickly while others wait interminably for service.
Keywords: Bumping of nursing positions; Foothills Hospital; Grande Prairie Hospital; Labour and Delivery Nursing; Misericordia Hospital; Private health costs; Toxic mould; Understaffing of nursing and pressure for overwork.
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See also: Occupational Health and Safety in Alberta; United Nurses of Alberta, Women and Work in Alberta