Supporting Our Employees
Recruiting and retaining staff in health-care organizations has never been more difficult. Burnout is rampant and many people still hesitate to work in frontline jobs since the pandemic.
However, Coast’s Chief HR Officer Deborah Maynard has found a silver lining.
“Mental health has received a lot of media attention recently,” she says, “and that’s helped us as there are many people who are interested in supporting others.”
Deborah also looks for ways to make Coast stand out from other health agencies, including Best Employer awards, and more recently, taking advantage of a new government program that pays people to go back to school to become mental health and addiction workers.
Annual employee engagement survey
Coast also administers an annual employee engagement survey to its over 800 full- and part-time workers to get a pulse on the workforce.
“We want to know how staff feel about things that are going on within the organization; to get their feedback on programs we might need to implement and training they might need to do,” says Deborah. “It’s important to hear the employee voice because they’re the ones doing the work.”
Health and safety training was an important organizational focus in 2023/2024 and the employee engagement survey reflected the success of these initiatives. The number of employees who strongly agreed about steps Coast takes to ensure safety went up significantly.
Coast U
Coast enhanced its learning management system, Coast U, in 2023/2024. All employees can access this online repository, which is full of training opportunities. It includes access to the Provincial Health Services Authority’s LearningHub as well as training sessions developed specifically for Coast staff.
“Employee training increased by 10% during 2023/2024 compared to the previous fiscal year,” says Deborah. “In any given week, topics from ethics and privacy, to the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHIMIS), to trauma-informed care, to gender diversity, to violence prevention, to handwashing, to medication management, to decolonization, to our payroll and benefits system are accessed. It runs the full scope of anything you could want to learn.”
The system ensures that training is standardized and has allowed us to increase our training capacity significantly. It ensures Coast delivers consistent messaging and knowledge. It also assists with safety. PHSA developed a three-hour module on resilience in 2023/2024 that Coast employees have found helpful. There are also sessions on how to de-escalate situations that are useful to people on the frontlines.
