Every day, residents in several B.C. communities wait with bated breath for four o’clock.
It’s the dreaded time when they learn whether their local emergency department will be temporarily closed, sometimes for days.
For those who rely on the Caribou Memorial Hospital in Williams Lake, B.C., the news has not been very good as of late. The hospital’s emergency department has been closed 10 times in July, with most of the closures happening on weekends.
“I can’t take it anymore. Closure, I can’t take it,” Williams Lake Mayor Surinderpal Rathor said, adding the hospital services tens of thousands of people from surrounding communities.
“(Caribou Memorial) Hospital is not (only) serving the Williams Lake community. It’s serving the region. It’s a regional hospital. It is very important to stay open. Not only summer, around the clock, 24/7, 365 days a year.”
Last Sunday, a wildfire broke out on the outskirts of Williams Lake. However, it happened to occur on the one weekend the emergency department was open this month.
For other Interior Health communities such as Merrit, Lilooet, Oliver and Creston, temporary closures have become a common occurrence.
Since Jan. 1, there have been 62 temporary closures — which Interior Health calls temporary service interruptions — including 28 so far in July.
In Dawson Creek, the local emergency room was closed over the weekend due to nursing coverage challenges and Chetwynd Hospital will be on diversion Monday evening.
Across the country, Alberta posts an interactive map showing diversions, while Ontario is experiencing a similar issue in rural communities.
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Mayors from several of the impacted B.C. communities have voiced their frustration. Earlier this month, Merritt Mayor Michael Goetz vowed to send the province an $84,000 bill for 19 days of emergency department interruptions, putting strain on the fire department last year.
Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA, Lorne Doerkson says with each closure, the problem is “becoming more frustrating and more angering all the time.”
“We’ve written letters. We’ve tried to communicate with (Health Minister Adrian) Dix and certainly with Interior Health. And clearly that’s potentially not having the impact that we had hoped to have,” he said.
Doerkson is organizing a community rally for Friday at 5:30 p.m. at Boitanio Park.
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“What I’m really hoping for is just a great turnout just to demonstrate to Interior Health that this is not just a few people that are concerned,” he said, adding his social media has been flooded with messages from people expressing concern about the ER closures.
“It’s not just the fires. It’s not just industry. It’s not just rodeo. It’s not just sport. You know, we’ve had extreme heat and temperatures… I can’t stress enough that our community is really at their wit’s end with the closures that have been happening at Caribou Memorial.”
Interior Health says the closures are due to physician and nursing staffing shortages and availability. It says it has hired one new nurse to the Williams Lake emergency department and two physicians will start work in the fall.
Health Minister Adrian Dix says staffing issues, vacations and health-related absences since the pandemic have made hospital diversions a “significant issue in summer.”
He points to work the province is doing such as hiring 17 additional nurses in Dawson Creek, moving away from a fee-for-service payment model for doctors and expanding GoHealth BC, which offers incentives for nurses to live and work in rural communities.
“We’ve got challenges all over the system, and we have dramatically increased the number of nurses and doctors in our system as well. And so all of that is coming together,” Dix said.
“And the key and the key challenge is, especially being able to cover overnight shifts. And some of that is incentives. But you got to recruit people to fill the shift.”
Clearwater has been a recent success story. After adding additional housing for health-care workers, among other strategies, it avoided diversion for 16 months.
“There are things you can do in the way of gestures, in the way of recruiting people for housing opportunities, and the way of bringing community partners on board to help with the problem,” Clearwater Mayor Merlin Blackwell said.
Ambulance Paramedics of BC president Jason Jackson says emergency department closures have added stress to paramedics as well, with longer response and transportation times. He says there are also concerns on how these longer times could impact patient care, especially during critical health emergencies.
He says 19 additional ambulance units have been added to communities which have seen more emergency room closures, however there are currently upwards of 400 vacant paramedic positions across the province being staffed by on-call or part-time workers.
“This certainly is not a long-term strategy. This might be a short-term strategy while they try to improve overall staffing of the facilities. But certainly, this is something that needs to get addressed.”
Rathor has asked for Interior Health to conduct an internal audit on the diversion issue. He would also like to see Thompson Rivers University expand its local two-year nursing program, allowing more students to graduate and hopefully remain within the community.
The mayor had also requested the province remove the COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health-care workers, which the province did last Friday.
Doerkson would like to see better communication from the health region with the community, including what it is doing to alleviate the problem and prevent future closures. He would also like an audit or review to be done by an independent agency.
“We have to address this and we have to do it right away, before somebody pays the ultimate price for this,” he said.
“It’s devastating. I can’t accept it. Nothing is more important to me than the well-being of my community.”