FILE PHOTO

Image Credit: PEXELS

The Health Sciences Association has identified a large and apparently somewhat easy-to-solve bottleneck in the health-care industry.

A January report from the HSA highlights how staffing shortages for medical imagers and radiation therapists are having compounding impacts across the industry — such as requiring cancer patients to travel to Washington for treatment.

Diagnostic procedures, including medical imaging, are used in over 60 per cent of medical decisions, the report says. But B.C. has a shortage of highly trained professionals who can perform ultrasounds, X-rays, CT scans, fluoroscopy, MRIs, mammography, nuclear medicine, PET scans and radiation therapy.

“Sometimes the public sees long wait times as the inability to access a specialist or a doctor, and we hope this will help them understand the role our members play,” Health Sciences Association president Kane Tse told The Tyee.

The HSA is a union representing more than 23,000 health science and community service professionals at over 250 hospitals and agencies in acute care, long-term care and community health, including workers at child development centres and transition houses, according to its website.

The good news is that the bottleneck is being caused by a relatively small staffing shortage.

The HSA’s report points to two forecasts. The first, by the BC Radiological Society, says there’s currently a shortage of around 248 full-time positions for medical radiation therapists who can do X-rays, CTs and MRIs, and of 87 full-time sonographers to run ultrasounds.

By 2028 those shortages are expected to rise to 504 and 43, respectively.

The second forecast, by the B.C. government’s labour market projections, predicts 1,370 job openings for medical radiation therapists from 2023 to 2033 and 470 job openings for medical sonographers.

These aren’t really significant numbers considering many health regions are short, for example, thousands of full-time nursing positions, said Andrew Longhurst, an HSA researcher and author of the study.

The HSA report calls for an increase in baseline staffing to alleviate these shortages. It also highlights some of the challenges the industry will face filling those positions.

To start, where are you going to get the staff?

Increasing post-secondary seats and clinical training

The report recommends increasing the number of seats and programs to boost post-secondary and clinical training capacity in B.C. because existing schools aren’t currently able to graduate enough new workers to meet the demand.

Right now there are a lot of school programs operating out of the Lower Mainland, where the cost of living is high, Longhurst said. Expanding programs across the province so people can go to school closer to or in their home community has been shown to boost recruitment and retention, he said.

Increasing clinical training capacity might be harder because clinics and practitioners are often happy to help train students but are already strapped for time with their staffing shortages, he added.

The report also recommends introducing tuition bursaries and paid practicums.

Practicums are currently unpaid. Students often move to the Lower Mainland for school and then may have to move to a new community for a practicum, for example in Kelowna, and pay for accommodation there too, all while not getting paid, Longhurst said.

Improving employee retention

Improving employee retention would also help address the shortage. To do this, the province needs to address its overreliance on agency workers, Tse said.

Agency staff are first hired by private for-profit agencies who then contract them to work in public health positions, rather than the public health authority hiring the worker directly.

Agency staff can be paid up to three times more than public health staff for working the same position and might have more say over working night shifts, overtime hours or when they take vacations, Tse said.

“The cost of that to the health-care system is huge,” Tse added.

It also demoralizes public health workers, who then might be more likely to leave the profession or start working for a private agency.

“Really it’s a health human resource crisis,” he added.

“When we can fill those positions, then the health authorities won’t need to turn to agency staffing,” Tse said.

Filling public health positions with public health employees is “how we can fight off privatization and this misguided belief that private services can somehow deliver the same services. They can, but just at a higher cost,” Tse said.

Tse said the Health Sciences Association has submitted its report to the B.C. Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills and the Ministry of Health.

When asked if it would accept the recommendations in the report, the Health Ministry told The Tyee it was making progress to train and recruit more medical imaging technologists and radiation therapists and was committed to expanding training opportunities, improving recruitment and retention, and redesigning and investing in workforce supports.

It also pointed to a $155.7-million investment from last May to recruit and retain allied health and clinical support staff.

This includes $73.1 million for the Provincial Rural Retention Incentive, which offers financial incentives to encourage workers to take jobs in rural and hard-to-fill positions; $60 million split evenly among the Facilities Bargaining Association, the Health Science Professionals Bargaining Association and the Community Bargaining Association for professional development and mental health supports; $15 million over three years for allied health clinical mentorship, peer support and support for new workers, including new grads and internationally educated workers; and $7.6 million for training initiatives, like tuition credits and bursaries to offset licensing exam fees.

Tse acknowledged this is helping address the staffing shortage.

“All of these strategies, they’re starting to work. They’re starting to show that they’re making a difference. But it takes time to do that,” Tse said.

— This article was originally published by The Tyee.

News from © iNFOnews, 2025