Photo: Shaun Penner / EverythingGP staff

By Abby Zieverink

Local healthcare

AHS responding to regional staffing challenges with various recruitment strategies

Sep 2, 2021 | 2:59 PM

Alberta Health Services says they are actively working to recruit healthcare staff for not only the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Grande Prairie, but also the new Grande Prairie Regional Hospital and community healthcare positions.

Senior Operating Officer of Clinical Operations for AHS in Grande Prairie, Stacy Greening, says although they are unsure of the timeline for filling current job vacancies in the city, she says they have recruited several healthcare workers recently and are continuing to hire more.

“We’ve already recruited a number of staff, and so it will be in the hundreds of staff that will be needed for both facilities and in healthcare in general, both in our community programs and facility programs.”

Greening says, to fill jobs in the area, recruitment is being done through several different strategies, in efforts to support both hospitals in recruitment and retention.

“Attending various virtual job fairs with rural managers to highlight where we have vacancies and where we need to do some recruitment.”

Greening says a Rural Health Professionals Action Plan has also been implemented by AHS to attract and retain qualified professionals to the area.

“So, that’s going to include a page focused on rural care on the AHS career site, and we are actively sourcing our critical positions through direct contact via LinkedIn, professional associations, Indeed and other talent networks.”

Meantime, this follows news from AHS that the QEII is postponing around 45 elective surgeries per week and closing one operating room due to an increase of COVID-19 patients requiring hospital care, as well as what Greening described in a memo to Grande Prairie City Hall last week as “unexpected staff vacancies” at the current hospital.

Greening says they are actively working to respond to those challenges at the QEII, which she describes as multi-faceted.

“One portion of that is that we are experiencing some staffing challenges currently,” said Greening.

“The other part of that, however, is the increased demand for services related to the number of patients who are COVID positive at this time, so those patients who require additional resources.”

Greening says, over the last 18 months, there was an increase of staff hired to support the pandemic response. She says they are looking to retain those hires to help fill open jobs in the region.

“We are leveraging the retention of an increased pandemic workforce through a targeted rural campaign, so a number of healthcare professionals have been on-boarded in the past 18 months to support the COVID response.”

A recruitment committee, Greening says, is looking at further retention strategies for healthcare workers in the region.

She says there is a specific committee for the new Grande Prairie Regional Hospital, that is looking at ways to offer job opportunities for the opening of the new hospital on December 4.

“A number of our HR professionals and talent acquisition professionals are working with us to ensure that we can recruit talent for our new site, and we have a lot of great talent at our current site that will be moving over with us,” explains Greening.

She says the new hospital will also be offering job opportunities for nursing graduates and undergraduates, and student nurses at Grande Prairie Regional College.

“The benefit of our new site too, is we have that correlated space with Grande Prairie Regional College, so we offer training programs, and we do a number of student placements on our site currently at the QEII but the new facility is going to allow for a richer experience so those students will be able to be on-site at an active treatment facility for a lot of their programming.”

Greening says, the new Grande Prairie Regional Hospital is still on track for opening its doors to the public on December 4, 2021.