Shared on behalf of Adam Vinet, Executive Vice President, Patient Experience and Chief Nursing Executive and Ron Turner, Interim Vice President, Patient Programs and Director, Acute Medicine, Stroke and Seniors’ Program

As an organization, the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre is committed to delivering quality patient care. In order to meet our community’s needs and move towards normal operations while still managing the pandemic we are using more nurses at the Hospital than we have ever used before.

We are utilizing nursing staff to:

• Run immunization clinics and the COVID Assessment Centre
• Support the changes in our Emergency Department’s footprint, which allows for social distancing while maintaining assessment and treatment spaces 
• Increased our Operating Room capacity to reduce any COVID related delays
• Continue to staff a 32 bed Transition Care Unit at Hogarth River Manner

Vacancy management is always a challenge especially in Northern Ontario. We are now facing a global, national and provincial nursing shortage. Health care sick leaves are up globally in every profession and the stress and burnout of the pandemic is real.

As an organization, we are engaged in the following activities to support our staffing:

• Participate in a regional Health Human Resource (HHR) Task Force to gain strategies for the North
• Regional Chief Nursing Executives are working together to look at HHR and nursing
• Partnering with our local college and university on enrollment and supporting international nursing graduates
• Working with recruitment specialists
• Focusing on retention strategies that are based on staff feedback

In addition to the above activities, we will be introducing Personal Support Workers (PSWs) to support the provision of patient care. PSWs work as a member of the interprofessional healthcare team. They are trained to assist in the identification of relevant patient information using basic assessment and communication skills, assist patient with routine activities of daily living, applying basic knowledge of growth and development, common alterations in functioning, disease prevention, health promotion and maintenance, rehabilitation and restorative care.

The addition of PSWs will allow our nurses to focus on acute patient needs while still ensuring that patient’s basic needs are being met. As our new model of care takes shape, additional information will be shared and staff will be engaged.