Westbank care home officially closed due to lack of staff

A Westbank First Nation care home has officially shuttered its doors due to a staff shortage.

The requirement for all B.C. workers long-term care homes to be fully vaccinated triggered the closure of Pine Acres Home, run by the Westbank First Nation.

READ MORE: Westbank First Nation long-term care home closing, victim of vaccine mandate

“As of Dec. 23, 2021, all residents of WFN’s long-term care facility, Pine Acres Home, were safely transitioned to their new residences and the facility is now closed,” according to a WFN statement, adding there were no active COVID-19 cases prior to the closure.

The care home opened in 1983 as an intermediate care facility but evolved into a complex care facility that included dementia care. It has 63 beds but the First Nation didn’t say in the statement how many were occupied.

During the week of Jan. 3 to 9, there were 21,517 health-care workers off sick out of 188,000 in B.C., said Health Minister Adrian Dix, Friday, Jan. 14.

Dix did not have comparable numbers for the entire province for previous years. His figures also did not include the Interior or Northern Health regions but showed about 10,000 more workers were off sick this year than the comparable week in each of the previous two years, likely due to COVID-19.

READ MORE: COVID making thousands of B.C. health-care workers sick

Interior Health did not immediately return a request for comment regarding how many long-term beds are in the heath authority and how many are currently available.

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