Doctors, nurses and Chilliwack Hospital administration to meet today to address OR nursing shortage now being called a crisis
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CHILLIWACK — Specialist physicians, operating room nurses, nursing managers, and Chilliwack General Hospital administration are scheduled to meet today, September 7 to address the acute nursing shortage in the operating room.
Multiple nurses have left the operating room in recent months, or are scheduled to leave, and several more nurses are slated to go on maternity leave in the coming months, dropping the number of daily ORs to just two a day.
A Chilliwack doctor who spoke on the condition of anonymity said there had been talk of opening up a fourth operating room per day, but chronic staffing shortages have only allowed Chilliwack Hospital to barely maintain three ORs daily, until the recent reduction to two ORs a day.
“This because in a blindly determined but unrealistic effort to open a fourth operating room, we lost so many nurses that we can only staff one or two operating rooms for the forseeable future,” the unnamed doctor said.
