Rural health centres in the Yukon didn’t face any full closures this summer, thanks to greatly improved vacancy rates in community nursing, according to the territorial health department.
However, a July 3 Facebook post by the Department of Health and Social Services suggests the Destruction Bay Health Centre closed on July 4 and an Aug. 2 Facebook post notes Pelly Crossing Health Centre closed over one weekend in early August due to lack of staff.
That’s compared to recent summers that saw days and weeks when different rural health centres across the Yukon were either temporarily closed or offering reduced services due to staff shortages.
By August 2023, close to half of Yukon’s health centres had temporarily closed and had services limited at some point due to a lack of nurses, despite the Yukon government touting progress and making an effort to get more much-needed health-care workers in the territory.
The opposition slammed the government’s inability to prevent these kinds of closures and service reductions that had been tallying up. The Yukon Party suggested the rolling closures of health centres is just one of several attempts by the government to reduce services in communities.
Teslin Mayor Gord Curran called the closures “unacceptable” last summer.
By phone on Sept. 5, Curran told the News he hasn’t seen any extended closures in his community in 2024.
“That’s been great,” he said.
Greta Powell, who works in communications for the Health and Social Services department, said by email that community nursing went into this summer with a 15-per-cent vacancy rate.
That’s compared to 2022 when the vacancy rate was 47 per cent.
Although the centres haven’t fully closed in 2024, Powell indicated there were “a few short periods” over the summer where services were “slightly reduced in a couple of communities due to unexpected absences of nursing staff.”
“Yukon EMS (emergency medical services) supported local health centres to ensure after hours emergency services were maintained in these instances,” Powell said.
Powell credits the Yukon's relatively new Health Human Resources Strategy, released in December 2023, for playing a major part in reducing the number of empty nursing positions in health centres.
The plan involves building international and Canadian education institution partnerships, more marketing, higher nursing salaries and providing nursing bonuses.
Community nursing ran new hire orientations in January and April. More orientations are planned for this fall, per Powell.
Powell said the department plans to attend two upcoming recruitment events in September to recruit more nurses to continue to fill empty positions.
Contact Dana Hatherly at dana.hatherly@yukon-news.com