Prince George, B.C. – Northern Health has been relatively successful in the past year in finding professionals to fill the vacancies in positions which are most difficult to fill.

During Monday’s public portion of a two-day NH board meeting in Valemount, directors received information that DTF vacancies, defined as those vacant over 90 days, dropped by 37% from 74 to 47.  Northern Health President and CEO Cathy Ulrich says while those DTF vacancies can encompass any of the professions as well as management and support staff, “typically the positions that are more difficult to fill are those more specialized areas.  So nurses in specialized areas like critical care, perioperative emergency, as well as thing like speech and language pathology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, pharmacy.  Those more specialized service areas can present challenges for us.”

As far as factors leading to the vacancy reduction Ulrich says “I think one of the things that has really helped us a lot is having education programs in the north for people who live in the north.  The advent of the Northern Cohorts physiotherapy program, the nursing program at UNBC, the nurse practitioner program at UNBC, the radiology program at the College of New Caledonia.  Those have been absolutely huge in terms of decreasing the vacancies that we have within Northern Health.”

“I think some of the other things are that we have what’s called an Employee Student Nurse program where we do supply employment opportunities for students within the north.  And we also provide placements for people in our northern facilities.  Very often people choose to work where they’ve had those kinds of experiences.”  Ulrich adds that in places like Fort St. John relatively new graduates have been brought in to some of the specialty areas where clinical educators mentor them and support them as they learn the more specialized functions in those areas.

On a more general question of whether the Northern Medical Program at the university is doing what it was created to do, namely train and retain in the north, Ulrich says “I think that it’s early days and I think we are going to see the benefits from the program in the coming years.  The physicians that went into specialty education are just now starting to graduate, and we’re really only in, I think, our third graduating group from the family medicine program.”

“I’ll give you an example.  Mackenzie is a community that had what I would call a revolving door of physicians over the last five years or so and we’ve had a very stable group of physicians up there now for 18 months to two years and four of those physicians are Northern Medical Program graduates.”

The NH board resumes its meeting in Valemount today, but this session is closed to the public.