IH needs staff: Almost 900 let go for not getting vaccinated

Interior Health is aggressively recruiting for staff across every department, with the CEO calling for anyone who is interested to make contact with them.

The efforts have been prompted, in part, by almost 900 job losses due to those staff choosing not to get the COVID-19 vaccine as per the government mandate introduced last year.

Also, up to 900 staff have been absent per day due to sickness.

“We need people. We’re aggressively marketing and recruiting anybody we can,” Susan Brown said on a media call Thursday. “The obvious people [to recruit] are … social work, pharmacy, lab technicians, nurses.”

But Brown added other less obvious jobs that need to be filled include human resource experts, information technology, finance and accountants.

“If there’s people out there considering a different or new career … I’m sure we would have work that fits your needs,” she said.

IH confirmed 895 people were let go in mid-November for not getting the jab. That’s four per cent of its total compliment of around 21,000 employees across the entire region.

While recruitment is a key long-term goal, challenges remain in the immediate term.

On Wednesday, Health Minister Adrian Dix said 3,389 of the 17,158 health care staff who called in sick last week were in the Interior.

“Our staff sick calls are far beyond what we’ve ever seen in a respiratory flu, cold-like season, peaking to almost 900 a day at the worst times, and 800 a day on an average,” Brown said, noting a third of absentees were due to the Omicron variant of concern.

Brown said the double-hit of staff sickness and vaccine mandate related job losses in such a short period of time had forced IH to announce the cancellation of elective surgeries last month.

Brown said around 1,200 surgeries had been postponed since Jan. 19, and if trends continue for the full four weeks as anticipated, a total of 2,700 elective surgeries will have been shelved. However, she highlighted how over the same time frame 2,800 urgent surgeries will have been performed.

But with the peak in cases and hospitalizations appearing to have been reached, Brown said there was hope for improvements in the system in the coming months.

“We are already looking to what recommencement of [elective surgery] service will look like, [and] it will likely be phased in, [so] not everybody is stood up at the same time,“ she said.

Latest numbers

On Thursday, B.C. reported 1,318 new cases of COVID-19 with five new deaths. The most new infections were in the Interior with 444, and two new deaths.

Across the province there are 867 people hospitalized with COVID-19 (26 fewer than Wednesday) and 138 are in intensive care (five fewer than Wednesday).

In the Interior, there were 181 people in hospital, for a daily decrease of four, and 25 in intensive care, two fewer than the day before.