The vaccine mandate for healthcare workers resulted in a "devastating" loss, but it was a necessary move, Interior Health president and CEO Susan Brown said at a Feb. 10, 2022 press conference.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Interior Health
February 10, 2022 - 2:05 PM
Health-care staff shortages have put pressure on Interior Health to cut services in rural communities and certain departments of larger hospitals, and largely it can be attributed to COVID-19.
The highly transmissible Omicron variant of the virus has forced an average of 800 staff per day to be away from work, peaking at 900 people in a single day. However, the amount of Interior Health staff away from work doubles if you count those that did not get their vaccination in time for the employee mandate.
In total, 895 people were terminated from Interior Health when they failed to show they had been fully vaccinated in time for the Oct. 26 mandate put in place by the provincial health ministry.
"We were harder hit than any of the other health authorities," Susan Brown, CEO and president of Interior Health said. "That was quite a loss over a short period of time."
READ MORE: B.C. not an 'outlier' when it comes to vaccine passports: Dr. Henry
That amounts to 4% of the more than 21,000 Interior Health employees, according to a spokesperson, who added in an emailed statement that they were given "several weeks" of eligibility for leave before they were let go.
That leave eligibility is now over.
After the vaccine mandate was announced in the fall, the B.C. Nurses Union vice-president Aman Grewal was concerned it would place added pressure on an already understaffed health-care system. Brown defended the move saying the loss of those employees was "devastating" but necessary for Interior Health.
"We are really sad that we had to lose those people, but as you know it's for the protection of the people that we serve and it's the right thing to do," Brown said at a press conference today, Feb. 10.
An Interior Health spokesperson could not say how those lost due to the vaccine mandate affected certain types of staff, but tallies sorted by area show the Okanagan was affected the most.
In the Okanagan region 426 people lost their job, followed by the Thompson/Cariboo/Shuswap with 230.
READ MORE: Slight drop in number of people most sick with COVID in B.C.
A rise in COVID-19 cases across the region led the health authority to reduce services, which affected both rural communities and larger population centres in the Interior Health region.
Around 1,200 elective surgeries have been postponed since Jan. 19, and a projected 2,800 could be postponed if the reductions continue to Feb. 16.
Getting through the backlog of elective surgeries will still take some forecasting and the health authority is not sure yet if surgeries will continue to be postponed into next week, or even longer. However, Brown remains optimistic.
"(Interior Health) does well coming out of a crisis," Brown said. "We've had lots of practice with wildfires, flooding and all sorts of different things."
Due to staffing shortages, Brown said people have been moved into different roles to fill gaps where staffing is needed in urgent healthcare areas.
READ MORE: Interior Health lagging behind Lower Mainland in the fight against Omicron
However, the health authority is still working to catch up with staffing losses it has faced, including staff that left since before the vaccine mandates were brought in for health-care workers.
In November, Interior Health told iNFOnews.ca it had hired 200 nurses for Royal Inland Hospital alone since January 2021, but the statement did not include the amount of staff lost over that time.
"We're aggressively marketing and recruiting anybody we can," Brown said, adding the health authority is hiring all types of professions including administration and IT positions.
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