Residents of another British Columbia community were left with a 12-hour gap in emergency room coverage this weekend, amid ongoing staffing shortages in the health-care system.
Interior Health said it was forced to close the emergency department at Clearwater’s Dr. Helmcken Memorial Hospital between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Sunday due to “unforeseen limited staffing availability.”
Patients were directed to Royal Inland Hospital (RIH) in Kamloops, about an hour and 20 minutes away.
On Friday Island Health was forced to close the ER at Port McNeill’s hospital for 12 hours due to a nursing shortage.
Clearwater Mayor Merlin Blackwell told Global News a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in the region has made closures at the hospital an unfortunate regularity.
“They’ve been ongoing for months. If I don’t get a call on a Friday or a Saturday to tell me there’s a hospital closure I’m shocked, I’m assuming there’s so many people off and they forgot to call me,” he said.
“I get citizen calls on this quite regularly, there’s a lot of concern about this in the community obviously, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.”
The hospital serves Clearwater’s estimated 2,400 residents, along with those who live in nearby rural communities and First Nations. It’s also a feeder for Royal Inland Hospital, which is also struggling with critical staff shortages.
Blackwell said the community is currently operating with the equivalent of 2.5 doctors when it needs five, and needs about eight more nurses willing to work part-time.
“To fill in the gaps when people catch COVID, when people want to go for a long weekend holiday with their kids, and health-care professionals need dental appointments and specialist appointments too. Right now the team is running an ironman. There is no time off and the only way that time off happens is when we shut things down,” he said.
One of the core problems, he said, is housing availability and affordability, an issue made worse by the presence of about 1,000 Trans Mountain pipeline expansion workers currently residing in the area.
In Kamloops, nurses recently met with the CEO of Interior Health to raise their own concerns about the staffing crisis at RIH.
The B.C. Nurses’ Union says members are burning out due to a lack of staff, too much overtime, redeployments and issues with a new electronic charting system.
The hospital’s pediatric ward was briefly closed earlier this month due to a lack of nurses.
“They have been carrying this healthcare crisis for far too long,” BCNU vice-president Adriane Gear told CFJC. “They show up every day and try to do the very best they can in some very challenging conditions, and we’re at a point where they just can’t do it anymore.”
Interior Health Authority CEO Susan Brown said officials are listening.
“I understand their concerns and we need to commit to actioning some of what they brought forward, as I said it was a productive meeting, they had ideas that were well thought out,” she said.
On Friday, Health Minister Adrian Dix said the province is working to resolve staffing shortages at urgent and primary care centres and nursing shortages.
Dix said the province recently added hundreds of spaces in nursing programs around the province, and is actively recruiting and training health-care workers for rural communities.
“About a month ago we added 602 new nursing spaces in BC colleges and universities across the province,” Dix said.
Dix said the province also continues to work with doctors on rolling out additional primary care networks and on other solutions to the lack of access to family physicians.
“It’s nice to see some extra training spaces start to come onboard, but those should have been announced and those should have been in the works three years ago, four years ago, and we would have already had nurses graduating from those programs,” Kamloops-North Thompson MLA and BC Liberal Finance Critic Peter Milobar told Global News Saturday.
Milobar said the NDP needs to provide funding and a clear plan to the public to address the staffing shortages cropping up around the province.
Back in Clearwater, Blackwell said he wants to see both Interior Health and the Ministry of Health throw their full weight behind addressing staffing issues.
He said in the short term, he’d like to see officials trying to entice people who have recently retired or left the sector back, at least on a part-time basis.
“It’s a regional crisis, its multi-factored, it involves things like centralized scheduling which have turned people off from working here, I’ve been hearing about toxic workplace environments within Interior Health and the hospitals for years and it’s all built to this,” he said.
“If we can turn around the workplace and make it a happier place plus incentivize a little bit maybe we can draw some of these people back part time into the workforce to sort of ease the pressure of a really bad situation for those that are left.”
— With files from Grace Ke