Nurses are in the midst of a shakeup at Kelowna General Hospital and the city‘s largest care facility.
Interior Health has closed 24 Cottonwoods Care Complex beds, forcing four registered nurses to move. And it plans to transfer patients out of a KGH ward to make room for convalescent patients, affecting more RNs.
No layoffs are foreseen. The nurses will use their seniority to bump other nurses in the Central Okanagan or to fill vacant positions. Licensed practical nurses, who earn lower salaries, will look after the convalescent patients at KGH because they require less care. The displaced registered nurses will lose their specialized skills when they move to other wards and may bump other nurses who also have unique skills, said Rhonda Croft, Okanagan chairwoman of the B.C. Nurses Union.
“It‘s in response to the budget,” she said. “What‘s coming is going to be very frightening. … We know more cuts are coming.”
Interior Health must eliminate a $40-million shortfall in its $1.5 billion budget by March. It has already laid off 50 staff and cut another 50 vacant positions in administration. There‘s less operating-room time and patient care has been affected.
But IH says the latest changes are not budget driven. KGH plans to convert a hospital ward to an “alternate level of care” (ALC) unit by Nov. 1, said Nancy Serwo, the hospital‘s director of health services.
Staff will move patients recovering from illness in several parts of the hospital and cluster them in a single unit.
A trial project last year found consolidating the convalescent patients in one area reduced their length of stay to an average 7.7 days, Serwo said. None of the 112 patients participating in the trial relapsed and needed acute care.
Until recently, health officials had planned to set up the convalescent unit in 5B, a 16-bed ward used for patients with acute medical problems like diabetes and kidney failure. The ward features two isolation rooms and negative-pressure rooms for patients with tuberculosis and other contagious diseases.
Doctors and senior nursing staff oppose the plan. At a meeting Wednesday, they protested enough to convince IH officials they should consider other sites in the hospital.
“They can‘t put it there (in 5B),” said Dr. David Kates, head of nephrology at KGH. “It‘s the best, most modern hospital real estate we have. We should use it for patients who need the most acute care, who are the sickest.”
Ten registered nurses work on the ward. KGH officials told them during the summer they‘d be displaced, said Croft. They‘re now waiting for official word on where they‘ll go.
“The head nurse and the LPNs would stay and the RNs would be displaced because they‘d no longer be needed in that configuration,” Croft said.
KGH has yet to decide where to place the convalescent unit, Serwo said. There will be no net loss of beds, but she agrees nurses displaced to other wards are less likely to use their specialized skills.
“Sometimes there‘s an opportunity for nurses to acquire a different level of expertise,” she said. “Displacements, for whatever reason, are often a time of angst. We appreciate that.”
The four registered nurses at Cottonwoods are also waiting for official displacement. Patients occupying 24 beds volunteered to move into Brandt‘s Creek Mews, a private care home in North Glenmore, said Faye Burch, director of residential services for the Central Okanagan.
With 24 fewer beds, there‘s more space to build common rooms with tables and TVs so residents have a better environment, she said. Staff are also converting wards so they house two residents instead of four, giving them more privacy.
“The renos are very non-disruptive,” Burch said. “They should take about a month.”
Cottonwoods now accommodates 213 residents, 60 of them short-term. The bed closures and transformation at Cottonwoods have been underway for over a year, said Cindy Rieger, the Okanagan‘s acting program administrator for residential services.
“Residents and staff were involved in the decision from the beginning,” she said. “We understand these changes can be difficult.”
