Kamloops physician says long-term retention needed to ease multi-department strain at RIH

“The latest one, of course, is the obstetricians and obstetrics care,” notes Hutchison, “but we have a number of other pressures in the hospital as well that are a problem — radiology being one of the big ones, for sure.”

Hutchison says a lot of the problems with staffing at community and regional hospitals relate to the ongoing effort to catch up to a previous dip in medical school enrollments from several years ago.

“Because of that, it’s easier for people to choose where they want to go and they’ll choose to go to bigger cities or more attractive cities at times. Some places have more difficulty recruiting than others and, certainly in some specialties, that’s what we’re facing in Kamloops right now.”

Hutchison acknowledges there have been recent improvements in certain departments with acquiring more doctors, but other departments are short.

“Gynecology seems to be struggling despite having seven in their group. Cardiology is lower than they would like to be. Emergency, we’re actually short eight full-time physicians right now out of what we should have — 30 full time equivalents and we’re eight short.”

Again, pointing to recruitment and retention as a key part of the problem.

“We know how great a place it is to live here. But we seem to be having trouble recruiting here for certain specialties compared to places like Kelowna,” he says, noting that in some departments, Kelowna has two-to-three times to amount of physicians that the Kamloops hospital currently has.

In Hutchison’s opinion, relying on shelling out money to pay for locums to fill gaps in the long term may not improve the situation overall.

“Just throwing more money at the problem, that’s being done with a lot of things and in a lot of places it has just caused different problems,” he explains. “For example, paying large amounts for people to go work small town [emergency rooms] that would be closed otherwise but, because of the money being paid to locums, the local people don’t get paid as well. And there’s less incentive for anybody to move there because they don’t get the locum incentives then. It’s actually, in ways, made the problem worse.”

The Interior has made headlines with extreme burnout cited by outgoing physicians, but workplace strain is spread around the country and BC’s former health minister, Terry Lake, feels some of that could be eased by working with evolving work-life expectations in the medical profession.

“Part of that problem is having one hand tied behind our backs with the Canada Health Act. It doesn’t allow us to be creative and allow doctors to practice in the way that they might want to practice,” he acknowledges. “I think everything should be under discussion to see how we can improve the healthcare system in this country.”

In spite of the need for better resources, Hutchison says RIH is “still a great hospital to work in” because of the healthcare teams it does have.

“We have some of the best trauma outcomes of any hospital in B.C. despite the relative lack of staffing. It’s because we work together to find a way to make it work and make sure patients are taken care of well.”

There’s no easy way out of current hospital issues, according to Hutchison, but something has to be figured out to make recruitment stick in the long term.

“I do think IHA has done a lot of good things but there’s some big gaps that make it hard to perform the tasks of a tertiary hospital, and that definitely needs to continue to be worked on,” he adds.

by Dylana Kneeshaw

Kamloops physician says long-term retention needed to ease multi-department strain at RIH

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