Recruiting new nurses a concern amid health-care staff shortage

With hundreds of psychiatric nurse positions unfilled in B.C., Vancouver’s mayor is modifying his promise to hire 100 mental health nurses, who he said would work alongside 100 new police officers in the Downtown Eastside.

The goalposts of Mayor Ken Sim’s promise have expanded to include a wider range of staff, according to Vancouver Coastal Health, which confirmed it's no longer just psychiatric nurses the city plans to help fund in the Downtown Eastside, but also peer support workers, social workers and Indigenous team members.

In the eyes of one registered psychiatric nurse who's seen the staffing shortage first hand, that's an unsurprising decision.

“We have to take care of our carers, you know?" said RPN Tess Kroeker.

He’s been working in the field for 28 years. He says nurses have been predicting a shortage for the past 15 years, but the pandemic has only exacerbated the problem.

"You have a population of nurses aging, so you have more retirements, but you also have less people going in to the profession," Kroeker said.

Fewer people entering nursing is something he believes is caused by a new type of negativity surrounding the profession since the start of the pandemic.

“In terms of the profession just sustaining and retaining nurses, making their work a little bit more recognized and valued and efficient (would help)," he said.

According to the president of Stenberg College, the school is having no issue filling admissions in its psychiatric program.

“There's a little bit of difficulty and challenge recruiting from the northeast of British Columbia,” said Jeremy Sabell.

Stenberg offers one of three psychiatric nursing programs in B.C. Sabell says most nurses at the college have jobs before even graduating.

"Whether it's one of the three schools who offer this program or us, we all want to see more people come in to this profession,” said Sabell.

He says the one key issue preventing the college from offering the course to more people is the number of spaces available for clinical practice rotations. Increasing that number could help give more potential students an opportunity to fill a gap in a health-care system that desperately needs more workers.