Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops is struggling with a staffing shortage.

(BRIE WELTON / iNFOnews.ca)

An emergency nurse at Royal Inland Hospital says the current severe staffing shortage has been building toward a crisis situation for several years, not just the past two.

The nurse, who will not be named due to likely job repercussions has worked in the emergency department for many years.

She said there is a common misconception that the current problems are due to the impacts of COVID, last year’s extreme wildfire activity in the area and vaccine mandates. However, she has witnessed ongoing staffing problems for years prior and points the blame at the Interior Health Authority for a lack of respect to employees.

“The culture of bullying, lack of appreciation, and lack of support has existed for many, many years, COVID has just pushed people to the point where they can’t deal with it anymore,” she said. “Putting the blame on things like vaccine mandates for lack of staffing neglects to address the real problems that have been ongoing.”

READ MORE: Severely low staff numbers at Kamloops hospital prompts walkout talks, pleas for help

She said staffing levels were unacceptable for a long time prior to the most recent pressures.

“We would look at Kelowna’s baseline staff numbers in disbelief wondering why they have so much more funding for staff in relation to patient visits, and when we asked a former director why can't we have safe ratios like Kelowna we were told ‘don’t compare yourself to Kelowna’.”

The nurse said over her nursing career the authority repeatedly downplayed and ignored the desperate pleas of their frontline staff for help, and instead minimalized the concerns of their employees.

“Early in COVID the emergency department, ICU and COVID unit sent a request to the authority to be supplied with hospital-laundered scrubs,” she said. “Staff was concerned about patient safety, personal safety, and about their family's safety, and felt that in order to feel safe and provide safe care that they should be provided with hospital scrubs.”

The nurse said the request was initially granted and then quickly rescinded.

“The three units then wrote a formal request, which included peer reviewed evidence that hospital supplied scrubs are best practice for infection control, submitted it to authority executives, and it was immediately denied,” she said. “Over the next few months we watched as all equivalent units across IH managed to obtain scrubs for their staff, all but RIH.”

Shortly after that, in 2020, the nursing staff was slapped with parking tickets.

READ MORE: Interior Health nurses are being buried in parking tickets during the pandemic

“For parking in empty parkades,” she said. “We were threatened to be pulled into HR for parking where we work. When we brought our concerns about scrubs, staffing levels, safety, and parking up to our director at that time, his response was ‘is that really the hill you want to die on?’

“Sadly, it turns out that’s the hill RIH and IH died on, because it was at that point that staff gave up and started resigning and leaving.”

Currently the hospital is well over capacity with every department short staffed to the point that the emergency department holds anywhere from 25-45 inpatients waiting for beds upstairs.

“Staffing levels are so dangerously low that nurses fear their licenses are at risk every time they show up to work,” the nurse said. “Managers on call and directors are often called by our charge nurses due to the critical state of the department and nothing is done, they don't even come in to see and try to help problem solve, it's always up to the few working to try and make it work somehow despite having no empty beds and no staff.”

READ MORE: Interior Health hires more nurses to address staffing shortages at Kamloops hospital

The nurse said the team is losing staff faster than they can be replaced and has not yet seen a plan for recruitment and staff retention put in place.

“No one seems to be taking accountability for these issues,” she said. “We don’t need politicians bickering about whose party is to blame, because unless you stop capitalizing on our struggle for political gain, and instead sit down and work together on a plan to fix it, then all parties are to blame.

“This hospital and Interior Health need an overhaul from the top down, because we deserve better, and our patients deserve better.”

The Interior Health Authority did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. 

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