RIH, BC Hospital nurses feeling exhausted, walking off job

KAMLOOPS — Two thirds of the emergency nurses at Royal Inland Hospital (RIH) have walked off the job recently, claiming they were exhausted and understaffed.

The BC Nurses Union (BCNU) says a large majority of them are choosing to reduce work hours or leave the profession altogether.

“They are breaking down,” says Scott Duvall, Regional Council Member for the Thompson North Okanagan Region at BCNU. “My fear is the same as their fear, the fear that something bad is going to happen… on their watch.”

Duvall adds that the quality of healthcare being offered to patients is dwindling because nurses are being spread thin. In the intensive care unit, Duvall says nurses are being assigned way more patients than they should be.

“One day, they did have to cancel all elective surgeries, and they had upwards of 40 admitted patients in the emergency room that had to be moved out to the post operative recovery area to be looked after until they could be found a bed on the ward,” he explains.

The nursing staffing crisis is something the entire province has been facing for a long time, but with the added weight of a two-year pandemic, a summer filled with heatwaves, and endless smoke and evacuations from wildfires, RIH nurses are feeling exasperated.

In an email to CFJC News, Interior Health said: “In addition to Royal Inland Hospital and Kamloops, people have been evacuated to sites throughout Interior Health and in neighbouring health authorities. Some staff have been redeployed within IH, including staff who have come to RIH.”

Duvall says the major solution is for the province to recruit more nurses. The provincial government says there wasn’t enough training and recruiting of nurses for the past few decades, and we see that reflected now.

“It’s challenging, we’ve been hiring tons of people, we’re going to keep doing that, and we’re going to keep training more… I don’t think we’ve ever seen, in my memory, a summer like this,” B.C.’s Health Minister Adrian Dix told CFJC News.

With Thompson Rivers University providing a nursing program in Kamloops, that should be easy, right?

“Another new grad has reported that her colleagues that she had just graduated with are choosing not to go to RIH due to their experiences there as student nurses,” Duvall says.

While the recruitment process is a work in progress, nurses continue to suffer from poor mental health, often a result of working 12 hour shifts without time to pause for a break.

“They want to provide the same type of care to every single person that they would provide to their family member, and they can’t,” he says.