The Manitoba Nurses Union says overtime for nurses at St. Boniface Hospital is reaching a crisis level.

The MNU says it's received 328 incidence reports of mandatory overtime since January 1st, which is equivalent to all reported mandatory overtime incidences last year.

Sandi Mowat, MNU president says there needs to be a short term plan.

"In the long term they are posting positions and they are attempting to staff those areas that are short staffed, but the short term needs to be addressed," said Mowat. "Certainly the issues in labour and delivery, they are experiencing short staffed shifts everyday and it is a difficult area to staff as it requires expertise. So they need to look at what their short time needs are to see if there are some other areas that they can get some expertise from and deal with it in the short term," explained Mowat.

Lori Lamont, Winnipeg Regional Health Authority acting chief operating officer and VP, nursing and health professionals says overall this year, and since the WRHA started the consolidation process, they are actually seeing a year over year decrease in the total amount of overtime that is occurring at St. Boniface Hospital, but there has been an increase in January and February of this year. She says there are many reasons for this increase including influenza.

"We saw a huge spike in activity across the system, but certainly impacted at St. Boinface Hospital with a significant number of admissions to hospital, which caused us to go into and remain in an overcapacity situation for the month of January, February and now most of March," said Lamont.

Lamont says the other area that they have seen a spike in volume in need for care is labour and delivery.

"Additionally at St. Boniface Hospital, as part of the shift to new staffing models, they implemented new staff schedules facility wide in the middle of January. This means that staff are moving to their new schedules. It also created new opportunities in terms of vacancies as staff moved around, and so we are currently going through the process of filling those vacancies," explained Lamont.

The WRHA is working to fill 33 positions, with most of those being in labour and delivery. She says they have been going through a number of rounds of hiring and have already hired 12 new nurses.

"I think that we said that right from the beginning that we never understood how all these changes were going to improve patient care," said Mowat. "And, certainly the rational we were given all along, particularly with all the deletions at St. Boniface hospital and the reorganization, was that this was all designed to reduce overtime and to improve the patient, staffing ratios etc. We were dubious at the time, and certainly it hasn't proved to be true when the overtime has actually increased dramatically since the reorganization has happened."