Nine actions rolled-out to bolster health care resources

The province has plans for 2024 to increase the workforce in the health care sector by providing them with more supports.

Health Minister Adrian Dix announced nine key actions to support patients and health care workers through health-human resources, as the province continues its work to bring in more health care professionals.

• Retain
  • Create a peer support and mentoring program to encourage health care workers support new entrants
  • Establish front-line clinical management supports in high-needs areas from senior clinical staff
  • Launch new professional practice and clinical education roles to connect academic knowledge and clinical practice with the goal of improving patient safety and supporting continuous improvements
• Redesign
  • Further expand GoHealth B.C., the provincial travel resource program supporting rural and remote communities, and add more health-sector occupations such as allied health to the service
• Recruit
  • Launch a new recruitment campaign in early 2024 to promote B.C.’s health care sector and then streamline the job search, recruitment and hiring process
  • Expand opportunities for high school students to explore the health sector, including through new dual credit programs
  • Launch a program to support new graduates in both nursing and allied health to transition to practice withing the public health care system
• Train
  • Expand the employed-student nurse program and develop a new employed-student allied-health program to help students improve their clinical skills and explore different practice settings while also making money
  • Implement a new bachelor of science in nursing practice education model that will allow nurses to train for a specialty of interest in their final years of school, rather than have to take specific training courses after graduation.

“These kind of important changes reflect what we have heard from people, that health care workers in the system need more support, and we need to continue to recruit more,” Dix said.

“We said we’d hire more health care workers, we did. We said we’d expand education and training, we did. We said we’d make our health care work places more supported to share the work load, we are. We said we would keep going until the health human resources part of our health care system is renewed, rebuilt and strengthened, and we will.”

Specific details on these actions will be released when the province officially rolls them out in 2024.

These actions are part of the Health Human Resources Strategy the province launched in 2022, which outlined 70 recommendations aimed to recruit, retain and train health care professionals in B.C.

Several actions from that strategy were implemented in 2023:

• Registering 3,882 family physicians for the longitudinal model
• Registering 6,258 new nurses with the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives, including 578 internationally educated nurses
• Adding over 1,000 new permanent full-time paramedic and emergency responder positions
• Hiring over 7,000 people into the Health Career Access Program where they gain non-clinical experience as a health care support worker
• Registering 666 international medical graduates
• Expanding pharmacists’ scope of practice so they can treat minor ailments and provide contraceptives, prescription adaptions, and drug administrations
• Hiring 320 relational security officers in health care settings

“I am thrilled to see more health workers have been trained and hired to work in communities throughout B.C., as well as long-term care settings, assisted living and the home health sector,” Harwinder Sandhu, Parliamentary Secretary for Seniors’ Services and MLA for Vernon-Monashee, said.

“Not only does this support our health-care workers, it also means our seniors receive the quality care they deserve and their loved ones can rest easier knowing health-care professionals are there to help and deliver the care they need. Our government is committed to continuing to strengthen the health-care and long-term care system across our province.”

The province committed nearly $1 billion in new funding over three years to implement the 70 actions in the Human Resources Strategy in Budget 2023. Of that, $253 million was committed to retention, $194 million to redesigning the system, $224 million for recruitment, and $314 million for training initiatives.