By CONNIE GIBBS
Here is a statistic to make you think. The number of seniors in our province is expected to double in the next decade.
More seniors living longer will mean more ambulance calls, more hospitalizations, more operations, more long term and extended care facilities and more support needed for people to stay in their homes as they age and finally die.
We don’t have enough people working in health care now. And we will need many more health care workers in the immediate future. A stay in our treasured Lady Minto, or a visit to a patient there, reveals the truth. The dedicated, overworked staff are stretched by the current unsustainable burden of caregiving they carry. Here on Salt Spring, like everywhere else in Canada, we need more doctors, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, lab and imaging technicians, paramedics, health care aides, social workers, mental health and addictions specialists and maintenance staff. At the same time, health care workers are burning out, reducing their hours and dropping out as the burden becomes too great.
How can we make working in health care at ALL levels more attractive than it is now?
Putting Band-Aids on a wounded health care system won’t help. Health care itself needs major surgery, not Band-Aids. We need bold initiatives to recruit, reward and retain public health care workers, to make working in health care a much more attractive career choice than it is now.
As one step in that direction, I would like to see the financial barriers to health care education dismantled.
When I worked as a student financial aid advisor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, I discovered that fully 50 per cent of the nursing students were already above the average student loan debt. Why were nursing students carrying so much educational debt before they’d even graduated? It takes four years to train a registered nurse. I found out prospective nursing students had already racked up student debt in post secondary education just to make themselves more competitive applicants to nursing programs with admission waitlists.
There is a provincial and federal student loan forgiveness program already in place that cancels student loans for graduates who serve five years in a public clinical workplace in an under-served community. You can find the list of approved under-served communities at studentaidbc.ca.
Salt Spring Island isn’t on that list. We should be. Isn’t it time to declare the whole province, indeed the whole country, as under-served and widely publicize the opportunity to graduate debt free from a health care program?
Besides expanding the loan forgiveness program, there is another opportunity to make health care careers more attractive. One of the entry level caregiving programs in health care is the health care assistant certificate program. Health care assistants work in hospitals, long term care facilities and private homes to help with the essential tasks of living, right up to providing end of life care. Camosun College offers this certificate program. The tuition is $3,000. What if tuition was waived completely for qualified applicants who complete the program and work in the field for two years? What if experienced employees could seamlessly progress to the next level, the licensed practical nurse diploma and beyond to the registered nurse degree with the incentive of tuition waivers for those willing to continue to upgrade their skills?
There are not enough health care assistants on Salt Spring to staff all the beds at Greenwoods despite dedicated efforts to recruit by the administration. There are not enough nurses at Lady Minto. There is not enough home support for people who want to stay at home and out of institutions.
We need to listen to our health care workers about what they need to care for elderly, sick, disabled patients. We need to support them so they can do their jobs without burning out.
Last fall, I had surgery at Victoria General Hospital. The operation was successful and I received excellent care from the nursing staff in the four-bed room I occupied. The nurses worked 12-hour shifts and I noticed at times, they stayed on duty past their long shift. The nurse on duty seemed to never stop moving while caring for us. I asked one nurse how she coped with the pace. She said sometimes she was so exhausted after her shift that she couldn’t even speak to her husband, who was a very understanding guy.
Late one night, a young nurse checked on me. She was a recent graduate from a local nursing program. I asked her if working on the ward was different from what she expected it would be as a student. She paused, then said that her training was based on a different nurse to patient ratio. She expected to be looking after four patients, but due to staff shortages, she was responsible for six. This young nurse was not complaining, only answering my question honestly.
The next morning, as I got ready to return to Salt Spring, I thought about that young nurse. I wondered if she would last in the hospital, and how long.
Connie Gibbs worked as a student financial aid advisor and community educator in the Lower Mainland before retiring. She has written about student finance for the Vancouver Sun, the Province, and the Globe and Mail. She is a new volunteer with the Salt Spring Hospice Society.
……and where will they live?