B.C.’s Interior Health issued several ‘Temporary Service Interruption’ notices over the Labour Day long weekend. Photo by Interior Health
Nathan Griffiths Published Sep 01, 2024
The ER at Merritt’s Nicola Valley hospital is closed until Monday at 8 a.m.
Emergency rooms closed at five Interior B.C. hospitals over the long weekend, including a continuing closure at Merritt’s Nicola Valley Hospital.
Staffing shortages forced ERs to close in Williams Lake, 100 Mile House, Lillooet, Oliver and Merritt, according to Interior Health.
Other than the Nicola Valley ER, which is expected to reopen Monday at 8 a.m., the closed ERs have since reopened. Closures took place on either Friday or Saturday night, except for 100 Mile District General Hospital, which was closed both days.
“A very high percentage of rural and remote emergency departments are basically being kept open by the willingness of a staff member to do additional on-call work,” said Paul Adams, executive director of B.C. Rural Health Network, a health care advocacy group.
“Everybody in the entire system is working hard to keep doors open and they do everything they can,” he said.
Adams pointed to the repeated, short-term closures of rural ERs as a sign that the current system wasn’t working.
“The real challenge … is that we haven’t built support systems within communities that take us out of this continual whack-a-mole-style management,” Adams said.
The closures at Williams Lake and 100 Mile House meant there were no open emergency rooms in Cariboo-Chilcotin, B.C. Conservative MLA Lorne Doerkson wrote on X.
“There must be an independent review of Interior Health!” he wrote.
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The Labour Day ER closures marked the second weekend in a row ERs closed in Lillooet, Oliver and Merritt.
Adams said while staffing issues in the Interior were intense, they were hardly unique, pointing to recent ER closures in Prince Rupert, Bella Coola, and Haida Gwaii.
“It’s happening right across the North,” he said.
Last weekend, Lillooet Hospital’s ER was closed for two days. Between Friday and Sunday evening last weekend, hospital ERs were closed in Mission, Oliver, Merritt, Kitimat, Mackenzie, Burns Lake and Dawson Creek.
Interior Health issued at least 30 notices of temporary ER closures in the month of August alone, according to a count by Postmedia.
”We are in the midst of a challenging summer and peak holiday season. Our site and health authority staff are working hard to fill shifts every day and we are going to keep fighting to keep (emergency departments) open,” the Ministry of Health wrote in a statement.
“There are major provincial efforts underway and then there are dozens of community efforts to address community specific circumstances,” the Health Ministry wrote.
“We know that when (emergency departments) close, it is a serious issue for people and it takes away their confidence in their community.”
Adams said the province needs to start thinking differently about its approach to rural health care.
“Nobody has a magic wand that you can just take and create physicians and nurses. But maybe we need to start looking at how we enhance the labour pool of people who can provide some level of service to keep an emergency door open,” he said.
People in a community who need life-threatening emergency care (such as chest pains, difficulty breathing, severe bleeding) should always call 911 for transport to the nearest available and appropriate facility.
