Healthcare

Trends in Healthcare: Health Human Resources Crisis

Tanya Dunne, Physiotherapist & Educator  — September 2023 

Why did I do that, you ask? For many reasons. The thrill of travelling and exploring new places. For the higher pay. But the main reason was because at that time it was impossible to get a regular full-time job in the public sector in Vancouver, British Columbia. You had to first take whatever casual position you could get and work to build up as much seniority as possible so that you would have a chance to bid into a position once a position did become vacant.

Flash forward twenty plus years and things are drastically different for physiotherapists within the public sector these days. The job boards are full of postings looking for physiotherapists to work at numerous locations across Vancouver and the province. Health authorities, desperate to hire staff, are implementing personalized concierge style recruiting services for potential hires. Managers are offering increasing shift flexibility in a desperate attempt to attract physiotherapists from the siren call of private practice.

This trend that we are facing throughout Canadian healthcare is commonly referred to as the health human resources crisis (Health Canada, 2022). As part of the BC Government’s economic recovery plan, StrongerBC (Government of British Columbia, 2023), the Ministry of Health launched its Health Human Resources Strategy in September 2022 outlining 70 key actions to strengthen the health care workforce (Government Communications and Public Engagement, n.d.). This strategy aims to make improvements in four main areas: retain, redesign, recruit, and train (Auer, 2022; BC Ministry of Health, September 2022). As a physiotherapist and educator in the public healthcare sector I am witnessing the implementation of many of these change initiatives. The expansion of physical therapist training and education seats is especially having a big effect on my current role and the physiotherapists with whom I work.  

In 2023, the University of British Columbia Master of Physical Therapy (UBC MPT) program added 20 seats to their class of 100 learners (UBC Faculty of Medicine, 2022). There are plans to add another 20 seats in 2024 and again in 2026, coming to a grand total of a class of 140 physical therapy students (B.C. Ministry of Health, 2022 July). While increasing training seats sounds like an obvious solution to fill the vacancies and relieve the shortages that we are experiencing in the public sector. The reality is that we don’t really know what effect it will have in the long term and in the short term it is actually making things more challenging. There is no guarantee that once trained and licensed, a process that takes over two years to complete, the new physical therapists will choose to work in the public sector.

UBC MPT students must complete 1080 hours of supervised clinical education in a variety of practice areas over the course of their program (UBC Department of Physical Therapy, 2024). These clinical placements are an essential part of the training of physical therapists as are the clinical educators that supervise the students. A clinical educator, or preceptor as they are also known, is any qualified registered Physical Therapist who volunteers to take a student on placement where they work.  Part of my educator role is finding these volunteers and coordinating these clinical placements.

In today’s work environment with staff shortages and increased workloads we have already been struggling to find enough preceptors to offer clinical placements to the UBC MPT program. Increasing the number of training seats is exacerbating this shortage. To address this challenge, we have been working with the UBC MPT program to explore new and innovative ways to offer clinical placement opportunities to students with the preceptors we have. One new supervision model we just trialed in acute care was increasing the number of students the preceptor supervises from one to four students. The trial had a few bumps but does show some promise as a way to address the increased demand for clinical placements while experiencing a shortage of preceptors in the public healthcare sector. We are also looking at ways to increase support for the preceptors, including making site visits when they have students and developing an education pathway for clinicians to build the necessary competencies to feel confident and qualified to take students. Hopefully innovations such as this will carry us through to when we reap the promised rewards of having more physical therapists enter BC public healthcare.