GoHealth

By Cheryl Jahn

GoHealth

Different nurse recruitment tool makes a difference

Mar 5, 2026 | 3:27 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The Central Interior via the college of New Caledonia and the University of Northern BC, graduate more than a hundred nurses each year from a variety of campuses. Most recently, the Province added a new accelerated program that will add to that mix in a couple of years. It’s all good news for Northern Health, the main recruitment body for every community in the region.

“Going back maybe 10 years, I’ll say, for Northern Health, it was a bit of a supply and demand issue,” explains Marc Lawrence, Executive Director for GoHealth in Northern Health. “Nurses would graduate from nursing school and they’d be looking for a job, and the supply might not have been in preferable communities. So if they wanted a full-time job, they would just have to look at going to a second-choice community. And that typically would be in the north. So we were able to recruit a lot of nurses through that supply and demand favorability, That’s changed, I would say, in recent years.”

What changed, says Lawrence, is a program called GoHealth. It draws on recruitment in the resource sector. The fly in-fly out model.

“Is there a certain segment of nurses who would prefer to work in that sort of system where they could come to a northern, rural and remote community for three weeks? Really work quite a few hours in a compressed schedule over there, and then have a greater amount of time off while they’re at home.”

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“GoHealth is sort of B.C.’s answer to agency or what we would consider private nursing,” says Raelene Stevensen with the BC Nurses’ Union. “So it is actually a really successful program, I think, to the extent that they’ve had to really decrease their applicants. Now, that’s how popular it’s been. And again, really encouraged to see that change. We’ve had agency nurses or private-for-profit agency nurses switch to GoHealth.”

She notes it allows nurses the flexibility to build their own schedule.

“So, a nurse will give us five different places they would like to go and work for a period of time. We’ll take a look at where we need them the most of those five places. And that’s the place we’ll send them to.”

So the question remains: Is it making a dent in addressing the nurses shortage?

“I would argue, yeah. It’s making a pretty substantial dent. In 2025, our nurses worked, almost 600,000 hours and almost 400,000 of those hours were in northern British Columbia. The other 200,000 were in Interior Health or Island Health communities. Also, rural, remote communities. And so that’s a pretty substantial dent in those nursing vacancies.”

In 2023, UNBC had 151 grads from the undergraduate nursing program.