Time to 'think outside the box' to fix Yukon hospital staffing challenges, doctor says

A doctor who works in Yukon says it's time to find new ways to address the shortage in health-care workers — for example, by delegating more work to nurse practitioners or physician assistants.

Dr. Kevin McLeod, an internal medicine specialist who divides his time between Whitehorse and Vancouver, said it has become "exceedingly challenging" to keep up with demand in the Yukon.  

Amid a shortage of staff, McLeod said he saw more than 60 new patients and even more follow-ups in a three-day span at Whitehorse General Hospital this month. 

The Yukon Hospital Corporation has warned of service delays, and cut down its room appointments — citing costs, inflation, and a need to ensure its services remain sustainable.  But McLeod told CBC's Yukon Morning the problem was not necessarily a lack of funding. "There are solutions that don't have to be expensive," he said. "You always hear, 'we need more doctors, we need more doctors.' Well, doctors are expensive and they complain a lot. And I'm sometimes one of them. Physician assistants are great to attach to a physician to extend their capacity. I can kind of off-load, very carefully, certain things that don't need to be done by me." McLeod believes the Yukon — which doesn't currently have practicing physician assistants — is the "perfect" place to experiment and see if that worked.

He also believes that nurse practitioners can play a larger role in the Yukon. 

"Just thinking a bit outside of the box, we need to expand people's scopes of practice," he said. 

"I know some of my colleagues won't like that, but you know, we've got to do what's best for patients. There are things that a nurse practitioner will do a million times better than me, that a physician assistant will do way better than me, right? There's things that I'm going to do way better than them. And it's just different training." 

In Alberta, nurse practitioners will soon be allowed to set up their own publicly-funded independent practices. The announcement has received swift pushback from doctors, who say it is "false equivalency" to think a nurse practitioner is a family physician.

But in a hospital environment, McLeod said it seemed "crazy" not to utilise the physician assistants and nurse practitioners who were living in the country, trained and ready to go. 

"We need a way more team-based approach," he said. 

The hospital workforce shortages in the Yukon appear to be right across the board.

Yukon Hospital Corporation is now advertising 56 jobs across its hospitals in Dawson City and Whitehorse. Nearly half the jobs advertised are nursing roles, offering up to $55 an hour plus bonuses. 

It's seeking eight medical radiological technologists in Whitehorse alone. 

Last week, there were more than 70 job postings — equivalent to about ten percent of the Yukon Hospital Corporation's total staff.