In SWITCH BC’s first two years, we wanted to tell you all about us, so our site was focused on introducing our new organization and our plans to support the health, safety, and wellbeing of everyone working in healthcare.

Those plans are now in action as our programs are rolling out.

Our new homepage now brings our work front and centre. Website developers call this the “hero” section. We know who the heroes in healthcare are and we know they need greater support to reduce injury rates, have strategies to prevent and reduce violent incidents at work, and improve psychological safety.

With funding and support from our bargaining association and employer partners, we are weeks away from introducing the OHS Resource Centre, a digital meeting and committee management platform for Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committees (JOHSC). There are more than 500 JOHSCs in healthcare in B.C. Research shows that supporting JOHSCs is one of the key levers in decreasing injury rates for workers. The OHS Resource Centre has been identified by unions and employers as a need for more than a decade. It is rewarding, after two years of collaborating with our 19 Technical Advisory Committee partners, to have the centre ready for testing at our first health organization over the summer and then to spread it more widely later this year.

Free download: a key piece of our work is B.C.’s first-ever Community Physician Health and Safety Guide. It’s a comprehensive resource developed in partnership with Doctors of BC and WorkSafeBC. The digital guide outlines all workplace health and safety requirements for physicians working in communities and their staff. We had the opportunity to showcase the guide at the Physicians Safety Summit and Quality Forum in April. The feedback we received was tremendous and we are thrilled to be able to take some of the administrative burden around sourcing regulatory and legislative requirements off of physicians and their staff.  The guide is a foundational component of the Community Physician Health and Safety program we are developing with funding through the Physician Master Agreement.

I’m proud to be part of a tripartite organization that values that input from all its partners and strives to support solutions that will have a positive impact on health care workers across the province. We are excited to continue to cocreate and implement solutions that improve the lives of everyone in healthcare.

Sincerely,
Victoria Schmid 
SWITCH BC Chief Executive Officer