Province Announces Minimum Nurse-to-Patient Ratios, Retention and Recruitment Investments

Together with the BCNU, the Ministry of Health has established minimum nurse-to-patient ratios for six health-care settings in acute care facilities. Examples include most adult medical and surgical units, where the ratio will be one nurse to every four patients and high-acuity units where it will be one nurse to two patients. This progress is supported by a $237 million investment for recruitment and retention, including: expanding the Provincial Rural Retention Incentive, providing signing bonuses for nurses who join GoHealthBC, offering signing bonuses to work in certain rural and remote communities, offering signing bonuses for difficult-to-fill vacancies in urban and metro communities, offering a nursing-student tuition credit, expanding access to bridging education for internationally educated nurses (IENs), increasing the availability of bursaries for nursing students (including bursaries for Indigenous students), launching a Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) to Registered Nurse (RN) Bridging Pilot Program, and providing new graduates with bursaries for their licensing exams.

Click here to read more about the new initiatives to support nursing in BC.