Healthcare staffing shortages were front and center at the Thompson Regional Hospital District Board meeting Thursday morning.
Interior Health Clinical Operations Vice President Diane Shendruk says they have developed a 30-60-90 day action plan to help health care services in the Kamloops region.
“RIH as everyone knows has very been experiencing an increased staffing and recruitment challenges and this is a combination of factors that have led us to this point,” she said.
“The 30-60-90 day is a very tight action plan but we believe the urgency is required.”
Shendruk says there are a plethora of reasons for the nursing and doctor shortages at Royal Inland Hospital.
“People have chosen to retire as we come out of the pandemic and people have decided where their priorities personally may be. We have people on temporary leaves for various reasons, we have various factors including increased COVID-19 transmission, long COVID, and related staff sick calls.”
Some key areas to be worked on in the plan include recruiting and onboarding new staff.
“Additional focus areas that are included which are sub-items to what you see to these main drivers are tactics to address our critical staffing levels in the short term as well as how we can support completion of specialty education for our specialty-trained people so we can sustain those services.”
Part of that plan, she says also addressed a “priority area of concern” raised by doctors and nurses at RIH.
“Which may not seem to be very important but for our staff, what was very important was access to scrubs in our emergency department, our critical care and our COVID unit was a top priority for them, so we were very quickly able to support staff in that way.”
Ken Christian, who is chair of the regional hospital district board, noted he was surprised to hear that scrubs were a “priority area of concern”
“It doesn’t reflect what I’ve been hearing as a local politician, and I assume my colleagues as well. We are hearing things like issues related to ER delays, issues related to ER closures, we are hearing issues about diversion and bypass.”
Christian adds other areas of concern he’s heard about include postponed or cancelled surgeries, limited access to long-term and critical care, as well as nursing shortages.
Shendruk also noted Thursday that the Thompson Nicola Regional District had provided $218 million to the health authority over the past decade.
Kamloops Mayor Ken Christian, who is also the chair of the regional hospital district board, says that money is from constituents, who rely on the health care system in the region.
“We hear from them regularly about concerns they have related to health care in this region and are concerned about their investment in terms of their contribution for that.”
