A new incentive program for attracting nurse practitioners will be included in the 2025 budget deliberations, Brighton council decided on Aug 12.
The nurse practitioners will be paid $5,000 each year to sign a service agreement for a minimum of two years to a maximum of five years. This is to help meet the needs of local people without doctors. This is in addition to the $100,000 the town offers doctors who come to Brighton for at least five years.
A nurse practitioner is a registered nurse with advanced university education. They can assess, diagnose, treat, and monitor various health problems. Doctors provide specialized care, perform surgeries, and require extensive training and education.
Politicians welcomed the incentive idea, but several councillors expressed dismay at the amount offered to nurses versus doctors.
Councillor Anne Butwell raised the issue first, asking how the $5,000 per year figure was determined.
Councillor Brian Faretis, who sits on the Health Services Advisory Committee, said paying a $5,000 incentive to attract nurse practitioners is already being done in Belleville and Quinte West.
“This simply puts us on an equal footing with Belleville and the county so that we can kind of hold our own and attract these sorts of individuals that are necessary. So I wholeheartedly endorse this,” he said.
The Lakeview Family Health Team in Brighton is now advertising for a lead nurse practitioner and supervisor to be headquartered locally to get the program up and running, he told council.
Butwell agreed with Faretis but continued to point out the inequity.
“I am very much aware that nurse practitioners tend to be a female-dominated industry, and to offer $5,000 a year when primary care physicians, although I realize it’s much more equitable at this point, are being offered $20,000 a year,” she said.
Faretis countered, saying there is a national shortage of 45,000 nurse practitioners. But he was worried about the impact of increasing the incentive.
“But the number is not something that we drive the market on. It’s driven by a larger center like Belleville, and if they’re successful with it, we should at least start there. What we don’t want to do is initiate a price war, obviously,” he said.
Councillors Emily Rowley and Jeff Wheeldon also supported Butwell, saying a larger incentive is needed.
Mayor Brian Ostrander supported Faretis.
“We certainly have been working hard to level that playing field across the Quinte region. And if you know, if the larger community of Belleville and Quinte West are asking or offering five, I think it behooves us to go along with them. I do get the inequity in the system that’s being created here. On the other hand, you know the market bears with the market bearers,” he said.
Butwell pushed back.
“I think it behooves all of us to consider that we have collectively lived as humans in the modern world for a long time where, and I’ll just say the ugly, where women have been paid significantly less than in their female-dominated industries, than for roughly equal work than male-dominated industries or their equivalents. And I really am not comfortable with setting a precedent at the very outset and then being lulled into the feeling like, well, we could change this over time. We will address the inequity over time, if we acknowledge that it is there, we speak it, we name it, we speak it, and then we do better,” she said.
Council approved the incentive program. Butwell voted against it.
