B.C. can’t recruit its way out of a health care staffing shortage

B.C. is investing billions of dollars to increase health care capacity and recruit more health-care workers. But we cannot recruit our way out of a staffing shortage if experienced workers continue to be sidelined by workplace injuries.

In 2025, workers in long-term care and home and community health lost more than 106,000 workdays to injury. In a system already being asked to care for a growing and aging population, those lost days represent capacity B.C. cannot afford to lose. 

Care is built on familiarity. Its foundation relies on a worker knowing how to approach someone who’s anxious, when to slow down, when a small change in behaviour means something is wrong, or how to support someone safely through a difficult moment. That knowledge is developed through time, trust and experience. 

When a caregiver is injured and away from work, that experience is suddenly missing from the team. For the worker, the impact is personal. For the people they care for, it can mean a disruption in routine, familiarity and trust. For coworkers, that translates to another shift to cover, a heavier workload or less time to recover before coming back the next day. 

There is encouraging news in the 2025 data. Injury rates fell 15 per cent in long-term care and 19 per cent in home and community health. These improvements demonstrate that progress is possible when employers, workers and prevention partners make safety a shared priority. Look a little closer, though, and the picture becomes more complicated. 

Long-term care workers lost more than 94,000 workdays to injury, slightly more than the year before. In home and community health, serious injuries made up a greater share of injuries than they did in 2024. The numbers can improve, and serious injuries can still leave a lasting mark on workers, teams and the care around them. The numbers also point us toward some of the pressures that have yet to ease. 

Overexertion remained the leading cause of claims in both sectors, while violence continued to account for a significant share of injuries. These are not abstract risks. They affect whether workers can remain in the jobs for which they have developed valuable skills, knowledge and relationships. 

For employers, that’s where the conversation needs to go next. Beyond whether the rate rose or fell, and into where people are still being hurt. The provincial picture will not be reflected equally in every workplace. An employer may see an improving overall rate while serious injuries remain concentrated in a particular task, location or team. 

Looking at injury type, severity, time away from work and recurring patterns can show where progress is taking hold and where attention is still needed. Workers are essential to the analysis. They see where a task has become safer, where a workaround has quietly become routine, where staffing pressures are creating strain and where a change in equipment, training or process has genuinely helped. Employers have the most immediate responsibility to act on the risks within their workplaces, but this is not solely an employer issue. 

Government, funders and healthsystem planners should recognize injury prevention as part of B.C.’s workforce strategy. Decisions about recruitment, service expansion, new models of care and new facilities must consider how workers will be kept safe once they are on the job.

B.C. will need more care in the years ahead, not less. Recruiting more workers will be essential, but recruitment alone will not create a sustainable workforce. We must also reduce the injuries that remove experienced people from the workplace and make it harder for their colleagues to continue. Employers can begin by listening to workers, investigating incidents and near misses, and using available prevention resources to address recurring risks. 

At a system level, injury prevention must be treated as an investment in retention, capacity and quality of care. We cannot build health-care capacity while treating the loss of experienced workers to injury as a separate issue. Every worker B.C. can keep healthy, safe and providing care is capacity we do not have to rebuild.

By Saleema Dhalla

Saleema Dhalla is the CEO of SafeCare BC, the health and safety association for 1,000+ long-term care and home and community care organizations across BC.

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