As a referring hospital that serves the entire northern half of the province, University Hospital of Northern B.C. (UHNBC) desperately needs a new surgical tower, said B.C. United leader Kevin Falcon in Prince George Thursday, July 18.
Falcon said that if he is elected premier this fall, construction of that hospital addition would be one of his top priorities.
“We would move forward immediately on building a patient tower that would include a cutting-edge cardiac care unit and a helipad to ensure that we can look after northerners close to home in a proper facility,” Falcon said.
He says it’s time for a provincial government that delivers on its promises and the new tower, first announced by the NDP more than four years ago, should have been a priority item for the health ministry.
“Northern and rural health is in a crisis now which I would liken to a five-alarm fire,” said Falcon, who addressed the media at Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond’s downtown office.
“We just saw in Fort St. John the fifth successive night where the emergency department is closed and UNHNBC, being the regional tertiary referral centre, is having to deal with many of those people that cannot get healthcare in those smaller communities. They have to come here and overwhelm the incredibly hard-working doctors, nurses and care aids that are doing their level best to try and deal with a very challenged situation.”
Falcon said B.C. United, when it formed the government as the B.C. Liberal Party prior to the NDP being elected in 2017, upheld its healthcare infrastructure commitments to build the pediatrics ward at UHNBC and the B.C. Cancer Centre for the North in Prince George.
“We do what we say we’re going to do,” he said.
“When we announced we were going ahead with the cancer centre it was delivered on schedule, on budget. When I stand here in Prince George today and say we’re going to build that tower and built it now, we mean it, and we have a track record to prove that we do what we say we’re going to do.”
After discussions with Bond, B.C. United’s shadow minister for health, Falcon says he is alarmed at how overloaded the province’s health system has become and the extent to which the morale of healthcare workers struggling to keep up with their workloads has suffered as a result of staffing shortages.
“I am genuinely worried about them as workers because they are getting so dispirited and burnt out and feeling unappreciated and frustrated with the bureaucracy that’s grown up under the NDP that many people are looking either to relocate or just exit from their practices,” said Falcon.
“So we have to move quickly to make sure that at minimum they’re working in an environment that is modern and gives them encouragement to go to work every day, but we also have to work on the human resource plan.
“The nurses’ union has been calling for nurse-patient ratios which we strongly endorse because we want nurses to feel good about their workplace and, of course, making sure we have the ability to train these doctors and nurses we’re going to need to ensure that when we get this new tower gets opened that we’ve got the people there to work.”
Falcon says the North deserves a comprehensive health strategy that addresses existing gaps and removes barriers to training while also delivering more training spaces and partnerships that will gives medical students opportunities to study new programs, such as speech-language pathology, which will help fill staff shortages.
He also highlighted the need for more residencies which could be filled by international medical students who completed their training abroad.
“Most of them are Canadian kids who want to come back and practice in B.C. but government rules and red tape are getting in the way and we have to fix that,” said Falcon.
“Two years ago, Shirley Bond and myself were already demanding the NDP expand the UBC Medical Program from 288 to 400 spaces. That would include additional spaces in the North at UNBC and they added zero seats until last year (when the government added 198 medical school seats) and that’s not acceptable.”
Bond said tower addition at UHNBC is long overdue. It was promised by Health Minister Adrian Dix the day before the writ dropped for the May 2020 election and the public has since been left in the dark about when it will actually be built and what it would contain.
"The people who live in this part of British Columbia need and deserve cardiac care and enhanced services at the University Hospital of Northern British Columbia," said Bond.
"I have raised this issue countless times with the government and we were promised that the project would move forward. We have seen virtually nothing happen in almost eight years. With a healthcare system in crisis our residents need to get the care they need closer to home. It is long past time to build the tower and upgrade our critical regional hospital."
