Sheila Cruikshank said she believes all the staff required to operate the new Oceanside Health Centre as promised will be in place by the time the facility opens next year.
“I’m optimistic, but I’m a realist,” Cruikshank, the director of community integration and service development for the Vancouver Island Health Authority (VIHA), said this week.
“I have a lot of work to do over the next seven months.”
When the health centre opens in July of 2013, Cruikshank will become its director, VIHA’s top employee on site.
The health centre will be filled with about 180 staff from existing VIHA facilities in the Oceanside area which are currently being leased and provide services like mental health and community care. In addition to that staff, Cruikshank says nurse practitioners will be hired in the fall, the same time the recruiting process will begin for a full-time primary care physician (family doctor). There will be additional staff hired — registered nurses, for example — but Cruikshank didn’t want to elaborate on the number or nature of those hires, saying that was a matter for the VIHA and appropriate unions to work out.
Cruikshank also said the VIHA is asking for one local family physician to re-locate his/her practice to the health centre. That move, plus the need for some of the local doctors to take on urgent care hours at the new facility, is something Cruikshank says she’s working on collaboratively with Oceanside physicians.
What happens if none of the local physicians want to take on urgent care hours? Would the facility be able to open with its promised hours of operation (7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., seven days and week, 365 days a year)?
“Because of the level of interest of people calling me already, I believe we will had the right people, the staff available when we open,” she said.
