Severe staffing shortages because of COVID-19 are becoming a real challenge at Interior Health.
That’s according to the organization’s chief executive officer, who spoke to the media at length on Thursday morning.
Susan Brown says the spread of the Omicron variant has hit the region hard, with hundreds of employees calling in sick every day.
“Our staff sick calls are far beyond what we’ve ever seen in a respiratory flu and cold-like season. Peaking to almost 900 calls a day at the worst times and 800 a day on average, which one-third of that is related to Omicron.”
However, also playing a factor is the number of employees no longer working at Interior Health due to vaccine mandates.
“We lost approximately 800 staff across (Interior Health) due to the mandates,” said Brown. “We lost a number of staff over a short period of time which made it very difficult for us.”
It’s believed 895 workers were terminated, or just over four per cent of the health organization’s total staffing levels.
“We were harder hit than any of the other health authorities,” said Brown, adding the job losses happened over a short period of time.
Despite the impact on staffing, Brown says the vaccine mandates were the right call.
“As you know, it’s for the protection of the people we serve and it’s the right thing to do,” said Brown.
Last month, Interior Health adjusted some services to help strengthen patient care, including postponing non-urgent surgeries.
“If we proceed to the full four weeks, which we anticipate, it will be approximately (a reduction of) 2,700 surgeries across all of the Interior Health,” said Brown, noting 1,200 surgeries have been postponed so far.
“But it is important to note that over that same timeframe we will do approximately 2,800 surgeries which will be urgent in nature.”
Interior Health says it’s unclear how many surgeries will be delayed, and, as such, it could not provide an estimate of when the backlog will start.
However, Brown said those surgeries will be prioritized.
“We will continue to monitor daily,” said Brown, “and hopefully we can get things back up and running as quickly as we can.”
Interior Health says staff have also been temporarily reassigned and redeployed to help support essential services throughout the region.
Kelowna General Hospital, which is operating at 115 per cent above capacity, and Kamloops Royal Inland Hospital, at 100 per cent, are both under pressure due to staffing shortages.
“That was the very reason why we decided to reduce elective surgeries was to cope with this,” said Brown. “It is very difficult when hospitals are over 100 per cent (capacity) because then we really need to bring in extra staff.”
The adjustments were expected to last four weeks, and Brown believes they have now passed the peak of staff sicknesses and hopes to decrease those numbers in the coming days.