Healthcare workers ‘on the move’: making visible the employment-related geographic mobility of healthcare workers

ABSTRACT

Many healthcare workers are ‘on the move’ as part of their employment, travelling often great distances to such places as patients’/clients’ homes and community clinics. Healthcare workers’ experiences of this employment-related geographic mobility have been relatively invisible even though mobility is necessary for home and community care. Interviews with professional (e.g. nurses) and paraprofessional (e.g. personal care assistants) healthcare workers in Nova Scotia (Canada) found that mobility includes safety risks, and health and economic costs, although a few professionals had employment contracts that helped to protect them against such risks and costs. Paraprofessionals appear to be most impacted by the economic costs given their lower incomes. Many healthcare workers also experienced travel positively, as time away from fixed sites, and associated this time with freedom. The risks of mobility were understood by some workers as part of a duty to care, but a few suggested that the health and economic costs are an undue burden, pointing to an opening for challenging these conditions. There is a need for regulations to ensure all healthcare workers are safe as they are mobile to and from fixed sites, and do not have to shoulder the health or economic costs of mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Geographic mobility
• healthcare workers
• gender
• invisible labour
• duty of care
• health and safety risks
• health and economic costs

Acknowledgements

The On the Move Partnership: Employment-Related Geographical Mobility in the Canadian Context is a project of the SafetyNet Centre for Occupational Health & Safety Research at Memorial University. On the Move is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through its Partnership Grants funding opportunity (895-2011-1019), the Research and Development Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and numerous university and community partners in Canada and elsewhere. The authors would also like to acknowledge funding provided by Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Gender and Health Research Chair in Gender, Work and Health Human Resources. The authors would also like to thank our community partners, the Nova Scotia Association of Social Workers, the Nova Scotia Government & General Employees Union and the Nova Scotia Community College.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grant #895-2011-1019.