The novel COVID-19 pandemic has been expected to impact the workloads of health care workers such as nurses, but to date, the magnitude of such changes has not been quantified. Compiling data about nurses' working conditions is important because excessive workload and overtime hours have been linked with decreased well-being and with implications for the long term health of workers and for health service delivery. To shed light on this issue, this study reports on the changes to nurses' overtime work hours before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19

COVID-19 has had and continues to have a clear impact on communities and families across the country. Many have lost family members and friends to the pandemic. In terms of lives lost, the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic should account for both the direct and indirect effects of the virus. Excess mortality, which occurs when there are more deaths during a period of time than what would be typical for that period, is one key measure that accounts for these effects. Statistics Canada used provisional data on deaths in Canada to produce provisional death estimates, which have been adjusted to account for the incomplete nature of the data due to reporting delays. These are in turn used with a measure of the number of deaths that would be expected to be observed were there no pandemic to produce an estimate of excess mortality. The provincial and territorial results are discussed.