Image Credit: Pikist

Last week’s announcement that the Pine Acres Home, a long term care facility on Westbank First Nation land in the Central Okanagan, is closing because of mandatory vaccination rules for staff came days before the same rules apply to the rest of B.C.’s health care workers.

Tomorrow, Oct. 26, is the deadline for other workers in health care facilities to have at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccination or be suspended without pay.

People working in long term care and assisted living facilities were required to have their first dose by Oct. 12.

Westbank First Nation announced on Thursday that Pine Acres will close in January after almost 40 years in operation.

READ MORE: Westbank First Nation long-term care home closing, victim of vaccine mandate

“Pine Acres has been operating under staffing shortages throughout the pandemic, and we anticipate that this will continue over the coming months,” the First Nation said in a news release. “We remain concerned about the risk this represents to our ability to provide quality care for residents, as well as the stress it places on our staff.”

Normally the home should operate with 57 employees but had dropped to 39 by last week. Three workers were not vaccinated by the Oct. 12 deadline and put on unpaid leave, the release states.

Of the 63 available beds at Pine Acres, 16 were vacant. Only five are occupied by members of Westbank First Nation.

Pine Acres is not the only health care facility struggling with staffing shortages throughout the pandemic. The B.C. Nurse’s Union has warned that the vaccine mandate will just add to the chronic staffing shortage and put patients’ health at risk.

READ MORE: Mandatory vaccines for nurses making hospitals even more unsafe: union

Provincial media have reported that 46,924 of 48,879 workers in long-term care and assisted living facilities had one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine by the Oct. 12 deadline, meaning almost 2,000 were put on unpaid leave.

Media also reported that, as of last week, 5,500 other health care workers, or four per cent of 129,924 such workers in B.C. had not been vaccinated. That could trigger thousands of more unpaid leaves tomorrow.

Those numbers had not been confirmed by the Ministry of Health as of publication time.

To contact a reporter for this story, email Rob Munro or call 250-808-0143 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. 

News from © iNFOnews, 2021