Connie Gibbs: B.C. needs to adopt new ways to recruit and retain health-care workers

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On Sept. 20, CBC hosted a virtual town hall on the health-care staffing crisis that is impacting health care all over the province. Health Minister Adrian Dix offered two solutions: add more spaces in post-secondary schools and recruit trained people from abroad.

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With the news full of stories of stressed and exhausted health-care workers, how can we entice more people to enrol in training to fill vacant and new positions at all levels in our crisis-ridden health care system? Health-care workers are leaving their jobs or reducing their hours because of understaffing, which has created unbearable working conditions. As a family doctor and University of B.C. faculty member, Dr. Rita McCracken said at the town hall event that we need health-care humans, not heroes.

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Drastically cutting the cost of their education is a powerful incentive to recruit more health-care workers. B.C. has a financial aid program already in place that could be leveraged to do just that. It’s called the Loan Forgiveness Program. Graduates of health-care programs in medicine, nursing, radiology and more can have their provincial student loans forgiven if they serve five years in an underserved community. Declare the whole province underserved, expand loan forgiveness and publicize this opportunity as widely as possible.

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Such a bold yet common sense move would position our province as a leader in Canada in tackling our national health-care crisis. It would also put pressure on the federal government to do the same with Canada student loans. (Students apply for student loans on one application that includes both Canada and B.C. loans.)

In my long career as a student financial aid adviser, I saw thousands of students who wanted to avoid graduating with debt. Sadly, for many there was no alternative. In partnership with the non-profit Credit Counselling Society, I reached out to students whose student loans were well above average, and offered extra support.

To our surprise, half the nursing students were in that category. It takes four years to train a registered nurse. Most of them had acquired previous post-secondary education to be competitive applicants to the nursing program. The more post-secondary education, the more student loans.

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This time of crisis might also be the right moment to review curriculum for health-care students to see if streamlining training programs could be done to shorten training without affecting quality.

The staffing crisis is hitting at all job levels in health care.

The Health Care Assistant program offered at Camosun College gives graduates a basic entry level to working in care homes and hospitals. It’s a seven-month certificate program; tuition and books cost over $3,000. Graduates have the option to progress into the second year of the two-year Licensed Practical Nurse program.

What if the B.C. government waived the tuition cost for this basic entry program? I believe this would be a powerful and cost-effective recruiting tool.

We desperately need to find short-time, mid term and long term solutions to fix the heath-care system on which we all depend.

Connie Gibbs is past chairwoman, Association of Student Awards Personnel of B.C., an award of merit recipient from the Canadian Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and recipient of a national award for financial literacy from the Credit Counselling Society.