BC Care Providers Association suffering from staffing crisis, desperate for nurses

KAMLOOPS — The BC Care Providers Association is calling its staffing shortage a crisis. Care Providers CEO, Terry Lake, says it’s a province-wide problem, but the Interior region is suffering the most.

Nursing homes are supposed to have a nurse on-site 24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week. Right now, Lake says this is not possible.

Early on in the pandemic, the BC’s Ministry of Health implemented a single-site order, restricting nurses from picking up shifts at multiple care homes in hopes to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Many care home nurses in Kamloops are leaving to work in other venues, such as vaccination clinics, leaving the care homes with significant vacancies.

Lake says he’s asking the Minister of Health to drop the single-site order.

“With the mandatory vaccination policy, why do we need the single-site order and tie our hands to be able to staff properly?” Lake said.

“Alberta has just dropped their single-site order because they have a mandatory vaccination policy, I don’t understand why we wouldn’t take that approach here,” he continued.

Lake says he has been sounding the alarm on the longterm care home staffing crisis to the Ministry of Health for weeks.

The BC Care Providers Association would like to see the government recruit more nurses.

Lake says nursing agencies are contributing to the already strained system.

“What nursing agencies will do is they will hire nurses away and then they will contract them back to care providers or to the acute care system for three times the cost,” Lake explained to CFJC News.

“There’s no controls over this. it’s almost like a hunger games right now for nurses and its chaos and its putting people at risk,” he added.