Happy New Year from all of us at SWITCH BC!

If you’re like me you’ve had years that have flown by, like when my kids were little, and years that seemed never-ending, anyone remember the pandemic?  I’ve also had a few years that I’ve known I would never forget. For me, 2024 has been one of these years. This past year was a year when our organization began delivering high-quality programs and resources to support the health, safety, and wellbeing of people working in healthcare with the launch of two key priorities. Much like those early years with my kids, it’s been a lot of hard work, fun, and I also know we couldn’t have done it without the village of people who have supported us.

In partnership with Providence Health Care, the BC Nurses’ Union, Hospital Employees’ Union, BC General Employees’ Union, and Health Sciences Association, we soft launched the OHS Resource Centre. The centre is the realization of a 10+ year effort of health unions and employers to better support the excellent work of Joint Occupational Health and Safety committees (JOHSC) throughout the health sector. The OHS Resource Centre is a digital meeting management platform with reporting capabilities that will allow employers to meet their regulatory requirements and make supporting health and safety easier for committees. It will be available to other health authorities and their JOHSCs in 2025. We’ve created learning materials from video tutorials to a step-by-step guide.

Community physicians and their staff now have much needed help when it comes to workplace health and safety support. The Community Physician Health and Safety program, in partnership with Doctors of BC and the Ministry of Health, includes clinic assessments, a web portal, and a regulations guide that takes the guesswork out of compliance with easy to access forms, policies, and procedures. For clinic assessments, our health and safety advisors visited more than 20 clinics across B.C. over the past few months and will continue to provide on-site support for more community physicians and their staff this year.

In 2025, our refreshed violence prevention curriculum will be complete for all health workers. The new curriculum includes eLearning scenarios so health workers can choose different settings that more closely resemble their work. For many reasons, verbal and physical violence is too common in healthcare. Updating the curriculum is the first step toward a robust violence prevention program that SWITCH BC plans to develop with its employer, union, and physician partners.

Psychological safety is another key priority for health workers and employers. SWITCH BC, with its partners, will establish a measurement and evaluation framework for Psychological Health and Safety (PHS), with worker participation throughout, to support three key pieces of work provincially.

• Developing measures of implementation progress of the CSA standard
• Developing measures to determine the state of PHS in the workplace
• Establishing baseline assessments of the current progress toward implementation and the current state of PHS in the workplace

Also in the coming year, we want to begin looking at promising practices of reducing musculoskeletal injuries (MSI) at work. MSI continues to be a leading cause of workplace injuries and while some unions and employers have developed programs to reduce injuries, there is no provincewide effort and we believe SWITCH BC can help invest and influence the good work underway.

As we head into the New Year, I am grateful for our supportive Board of Directors, the dedicated occupational health and safety experts who sit on our Technical Advisory Committee, working groups, oversight groups and other committees, our staff who have worked tirelessly this year to support program rollouts and future planning, and especially for the 330,000+ people who work in healthcare. You are what drives our work!

Victoria Schmid
SWITCH BC, CEO