The hospital of Burns Lake has a fully equipped operating room, but not enough staff to use it. “Nurses are like hen’s teeth,” says village councillor Charlie Rensby, the chair of the Recruitment and Retention of Medical Professionals Committee in the Lakes District. Rensby talks to CICK about the district’s “out-of-the-box” efforts to attract healthcare workers who are willing to move to the wild north of British Columbia. Those efforts include help with housing and even social integration for busy doctors and nurses who don’t always have time to meet neighbours in this tight knit community.
The need for staffing is all the more urgent since the hospital also serves the nearby First Nations communities of the Lake Babine Nation and Ts’il Kaz Koh. “There’s nothing that we are too proud or afraid of doing to encourage medical professionals to come here and stay here,” says Rensby in this engaging interview.
