The closure of three operating rooms at St. Paul's hospital is puzzling. Providence Health Care, responsible for St. Paul's, maintains that the closures and contracting out to private clinics are only interim measures due to a shortage of operating room nurses. Why can the private clinics attract and retain operating room nurses while the public hospitals cannot, even with contracts Health Minister Collin Hansen continually describes as amongst the richest in Canada?

According to the Vancouver Sun story, the sudden operating room nurse shortage is due to an unusual number of retirements, educational leaves and resignations. Retirements and educational leaves are scheduled. The Minister of Health claims that BC has added thousands of nurses. A spokesperson for St. Paul's says that they are offering six month training courses for operating room nurses. None of that answers why the public system with thousands of nurses cannot respond to the planning problem at St. Paul's while the still small private clinics have no problem picking up an additional 1,000 surgeries now being contracted to them.

It is good that patients will not have to wait longer for their surgeries, but the explanations for shifting the surgeries to private clinics don't make sense. Managers in BC's public health system make six figure salaries; they don't earn those big bucks for making planning errors. An independent review is necessary to explain what happened at St. Pauls and why the private clinics can recruit and retain operating room nurses when St. Pauls can't. If the private clinics are doing a better job with their nursing policies, the public system should find out how they do it, and learn from it.