Northern Health sees overall increase in staff over the past year

Northern Health held its first in-person public board meeting of 2026 today (Tuesday) in Smithers.

Several topics were brought up through the meeting including the 678 net employee gain seen in the past 12 months.

“We are recruiting more people than we ever have, we are retaining people a little bit longer than we have in the past, but we are still facing a large vacancy rate,” said David Williams, Vice President of Human Resources.

As of March 1, Northern Health said 17.82 per cent of baseline positions remained vacant with 60 per cent of those being difficult positions to fill.

“Difficult to fill are positions that have been vacant for 90 days plus and often in some of our smaller communities, that could be any position,” Williams added.

Some of the new hires came from the health authority’s recruitment and training initiatives.

Those include the new graduate nurse recruitment (166 hired) and Employed Student Nurse Program (174 hired).

President and CEO Ciro Panessa said recruitment has been a piece Northern Health has been working on for several years and is starting to see the results of it.

“What we’re starting to see is a decrease in those service interruptions. Even in Burns Lake, we have a number of medical staff arriving over the course of this year,” Panessa said.

He added Smithers is on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of recruitment and retention success with one of the lowest vacancy rates in Northern Health.

“It’s an ongoing effort because this problem is not just focused in northern B.C., it is province and country wide,” said Colleen Nyce, Board Chair.

“The results are showing from all the effort and work the teams are doing,” she added.

Panessa said the current vacancies in Northern Health are the most difficult to fill with further work towards increasing recruitment ahead.

The health authority employs about 10,900 people.