B.C. Expanding Health-Care Workforce And Increasing Patient Access

The BC Government says its plan to attract more health care workers is  working.

“We’re putting people first by making unprecedented investments into B.C.’s health-care workforce and system,” said Adrian Dix, Minister of Health.

“In response to rapidly growing patient demand for health-care services and a global shortage of health-care workers, we launched B.C.’s Health and Human Resources Strategy last year to recruit, retain and train more health-care workers. We said we’d hire, educate, and retrain more health-care workers, and we did. We said we’d make our health-care workplaces more supportive to share the workload, and we are. We said we’d keep working to expand and support our health-care workforce until our health-care workforce and system was renewed, rebuilt, and strengthened for patients and for those caring for them, and we will.”

Dix says that includes 578 internationally educated nurses this year - more than double from last year.

The province says it has also added more than 1,000 new permanent full-time paramedic and emergency responder positions.

The government says it will continue to work on new hires and recruitment programs over the next year.

To see the full release, visit Government of British Columbia.