Labour Day long weekend sees multiple ER closures in B.C.

A healthcare advocacy group is sounding the alarm after more emergency rooms saw closures over the Labour Day long weekend.

ERs in Oliver, Williams Lake, 100 Mile House, Lillooet and Merrit saw closures. In total, closures have struck dozens of times in August alone.

Executive Director of BC Rural Health Network Paul Adams says emergency departments being closed is a huge concern for the safety of those living in remote and rural areas.

“We have emergency rooms placed strategically in order to cover populations and when any emergency department is closed for any period of time that poses a safety and health concern for all the residents in that community,” he said.

Adams thinks that the number of closures is much higher than what’s being reported.

“We have temporary closures, which have now been ongoing for a couple of years,” he said.

He gives Ashcroft as an example of a community where the urgent primary care clinic has been closed “temporarily” for years now.

Adams says over the Labour Day long weekend problems were magnified because everyone was directed to Kamloops which put “additional strain and stresses on that system.”

“Now we have tourists who are on the road. We have kids who are doing their last vacations before school comes back, and we have people who are further at risk due to the high volume of traffic and problems that we can encounter on some of the most dangerous highways in the province,” he said.

The advocate says the province is making good investments in the future and it needs to have more physicians and nurses trained. He says those investments should’ve been made “decades ago.”

“We won’t see the benefit and the return on those investments for a long time yet, so in the immediate term we need to handle the situation as it is, which is a crisis,” said Adams.

Adams says alternate ways of keeping emergency doors open could mean something as simple as “using paramedics as a triage within those facilities” or bringing other skill sets in to support nurses and physicians and reduce their burdens.

“We need the division within the Ministry of Health that is focused on rural issues, because we are not small urban populations where we’re unique, and we need to consider those unique qualities to provide solutions for rural residents,” he said.