Cypress Health Region 2

The Cypress Health Region is actively seeking temporary and part-time nursing staff to assist with 24-hour operating facilities.

Last week, the Southwest Integrated Healthcare Facility in Maple Creek had a 12 hour disruption in its emergency outpatient services department due to medical emergencies that left the facility short-staffed, as CEO of the Cypress Health Region, Beth Vachon explains.

"What ended up happening is we had a 12 hour diversion from 7pm to 7am the next morning, so 12 hours we had to shut the door for services at the hospital. The reason for that is we had our nurse working days, and we had a patient come in that required transport with medical personnel going with, so our day nurse went in the back of the ambulance. We called our on-call nurse in to cover the rest of the shift," she explains. "Another patient came in requiring someone to go with them as well, so that nurse got in the back of the next ambulance, which meant we then had to call on our night nurse to finish that day shift. From there, we started trying to find someone who could cover the night shift, but we used all of our resources for those two patients that needed to be transported."

Vachon says a diversion is a rare occasion, and the Region does all that it can to avoid such a situation.

"Often where we find ourselves in these positions is maternity leaves, or somebody may have an injury or an illness that they need to be off for a period of time, so we can't cover all of those shifts. We look to recruiting in a temporary capacity because we know those people are coming back to the jobs that they own and we have to hold them for them," she said. "It's not ideal, and we don't take it lightly. We spend hours trying to avoid diversion. We look to other facilities if there is a staff that were able to back-fill in another community, we'll do that and bring that person to another community. There's lots of things that we do to try to avoid it, and I think what's really important is that at any given time as we're trying to replace shifts that need to be replaced, our staff pick up lots of extra when I talk about part-time staff picking up to full time hours to ensure that shifts are covered. We have staff who work some over time in order to cover when we've got some shifts that need to be covered."

Vachon adds one of the directors at a facility spent 35 hours trying to cover a shift to avoid a diversion, and was successful.

This marks the second time this summer that a diversion in emergency outpatient services was called to order, with the first happening in Shaunavon. As of right now, the Health Region is recruiting staff for two temporary positions.

"We have a temporary part-time nursing position that we're trying to recruit to, it's a .36, so a third of a position. The other is a temporary part-time .64, so two-thirds of a position, so in fact, we're short about one position right now. Because those are temporary positions, that means according to our collective bargaining agreement, somebody owns those positions and we need to hold them until they come back," added Vachon. "We know it's challenging to find temporary people to come in and then it is challenging when it's part time positions. Having said that, we would look at potentially pulling those together and increasing hours. We can be somewhat creative when we're doing some of that recruiting, but they're not long term positions."

Vachon says the answer is not to hire two full-time nurses for every shift, as it's not reasonable for the work or from a budget perspective, but to have a solid mix of temporary, part-time, and full-time staff in these facilities.

In the case of an emergency while a disruption in facility service is in place, the Health Region urges patients to call 911 for immediate assistance.