Thunder Bay, Ont., hospital struggles to expand services despite having more nurses than pre-pandemic – CBC
Transitional care unit operating at half of previous capacity, operating room hours could increase
Nov 09, 2021
A nursing shortage at Thunder Bay’s regional hospital is keeping its transitional care unit from running at full capacity and limiting the expansion of operating room hours, says a top official at the northwestern Ontario facility.
The Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre faces the same staffing challenges as the rest of the province and Canada, said Adam Vinet, the hospital’s executive vice-president of patient experience and chief nursing executive.
“When we’re moving back to normal operations, or pre-COVID, to meet the clinical needs of our community while still managing the pandemic there are going to be some staffing challenges,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is meet the community needs and we’re using more nursing as a hospital than we’ve ever done before as COVID has changed us.
“We do more immunization and vaccination clinics for COVID. We’ve had to increase our operating room capacity, surgical daycare capacity, recovery room capacity, and that takes increased amounts of nurses.”
Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-hospital-nursing-shortage-1.6241503
