Concerns for safety of staff, patients at Northern Health facilities raised in Legislature Question Period

BC United Health Care critic Shirley Bond outlined a number
of details from a leaked Northern Health memo on Wednesday

With Northern Health already in the political spotlight over the long running month of Emergency Room Closures in Prince Rupert, the Health Authority found itself back at the top of the discussion list on Wednesday in the BC Legislature, with concerns over safety of staff and patients raised in the Chamber.

Shirley Bond, the Health critic for the BC United opposition revealed some details of a leaked report from Northern Health that catalogued some concerning directives for staff when it comes to patients and visitors that are admitted to health care facilities in the North.

With the focus for much of Question period that of  little in the way of enforcement on the use of drugs or presence of weapons in Health care facilities, with much of what the Opposition called the chaos of the hospitals related to the government's policy of drug decriminalization. 

The NDP have created a free-for-all with open drug use — shockingly, even within our public hospitals. A leaked memo providing direction to nurses blatantly states: "With decriminalization, patients can use substances while they are in their hospital rooms." The entire memo is outrageous. 

Under this NDP government, illicit drug use and, yes, even drug trafficking in hospitals are not just tolerated, but they are endorsed. So when will the Premier put the safety of nurses and other patients first and end his dangerous decriminalization experiment?

In response, Health Minister Adrian Dix noted of the recent hiring of security officers as part of the Government's approach to more secure health facilities.

I think the priority of addressing the safety of health care workers, of doctors and nurses, of health sciences professionals in all of our health care institutions is a singular priority of all of us. It's critical to ensuring that we have nurses, and we have nurses in place, and we recruit and we retain nurses. 

It is important to ensure their safety. It's why we listened to nurses and to health care workers and to health sciences professionals and doctors in changing the security model in acute care hospitals more than a year ago. 

There were questions raised about this, as to whether we would meet our targets. We said we'd hire 320 relational security officers across 26 acute care hospitals, and we, in fact, met those  targets in exactly the time we said we'd do that. 

We worked with our nurses. These were recommendations from our community of health care workers. And we're going to continue to take all the actions required to ensure that health care workers are safe in our health care institutions.

Ms Bond countered that review of the government's success with more details of the concerns of the nurses and other staff members of the hospitals.

Well, the members opposite might think about their clapping when they start listening to nurses. 

What nurses are saying in British Columbia is that drug use is allowed, permitted and endorsed by this minister and this government in hospital beds in public hospitals. That's what the memo says. 

So the minister can talk all he wants about security guards. They're not using them. People are using drugs in hospitals. Courageous nurses are coming forward all across British Columbia with alarming accounts of daily encounters with meth, cocaine and fentanyl use in our hospitals. 

Chaos and harm have been unleashed by this government, with reports of meth being smoked in a unit just hours after the birth of a newborn baby. That's what nurses are saying, and that's what's going on in hospitals under this minister's watch. 

How many more nurses have to be put at risk and infants exposed to illicit hard drugs in our hospitals before the Premier puts an end to this reckless decriminalization experiment?

BC United member Elenore Sturko highlighted another passage of the leaked report that observed that nurses and other staff were instructed not to remove any weapons that may be brought into the hospitals.

It is a slap in the face to nurses to hear this government deny the reality of what is happening under their watch. Nurses are so exposed to drug smoke that they have to visit the emergency room, and many fear for their safety because of the weapons that are now permitted. 

This is confirmed in the leaked memo. Confirmed in the leaked memo For staff….  

For all the incredulous glares, you will see this. But this is confirmed in the memo. And I quote: "Even if there is a knife or something considered as a weapon, it is not to be removed." 

So how many nurses have to get stabbed before this Premier will end his reckless experiment?

Those health care revelations and other themes of over extended nursing staff and doctors in British Columbia hospitals dominated the raucous Question Period, with the Opposition clearly realizing that the NDP government is vulnerable on the topic of how they are handling the health care crisis in the province.

For his part, Minister Dix countered with some background on improvements that the government has made to health care in the Northern health region and elsewhere.

I think everybody who works in the health care system, who visits a public hospital, knows it is absolutely unacceptable for people to have weapons in public hospitals. Unacceptable that we need to take, and we do, on a regular basis…. I have visited in the last few months 31 public hospitals, and in every one of them I've met with nurses. In every one of them, we've addressed issues of code whites and security for nurses, for health sciences professionals, for health care workers. In every one of them, we work together to ensure that people are safer in our public hospitals and in other health care facilities. There are challenges in society, but the people who work in the front lines of health care have played, in my view, a heroic role. They deserve our support on every occasion, and they will always have it. 

What we do, what we've consistently done, is work with our health care workers, work with their organizations, work with the public to improve health care in British Columbia. With respect to nurses, that means working together to support better, safer security in our public hospitals by adopting their proposal that they made, along with the HEU and along with the HSA, to change the way we do security.

It means working with our nurses to put in place nurse ratios with a significant investment. It means recruiting and supporting nurses in health care facilities. It means moving our health care workers who are in precarious work into more secure and safer work by repatriating health care contracts. It means supporting at every turn our health care workers, and we're going to continue to do that.

The details as relayed through the Legislature on Wednesday were alarming and perhaps provide some much needed clarity as to why facilities are having challenges in recruiting staff and as has been the case in Prince Rupert this last month and for other communities in BC, leaving the public without important health care services at all for extended periods of time.

In addition to the BC United questions, members of the Greens and the BC Conservatives also outlined a range of health care concerns from their constituents from across the province.

The full back and forth of the debate from Question Period can be reviewed from the Legislature video here.

Some of the details from the leaked memo out of Northern health were relayed by the Vancouver Sun yesterday.

More notes from the Legislature can be reviewed here.

More on Northern Health themes is available from our archive page.