Over in Hudson’s Hope, the Emergency room will be shut down for at least the next three weeks, as the community is down to just one doctor.
Meanwhile, here in Tumbler Ridge, Dr Tamara Pacholuk has sent a letter to her patients saying that she’s no longer going to be working with Northern Health as of September.
This brings the number of doctors working at the clinic down to one, plus locums.
Dr Ifeanyichuku Akanegbu—who was the head of the Health Centre in Tumbler Ridge—left Tumbler Ridge in March.
In the case of Doctor Pacholuk, she’s not leaving the town, just the clinic. “I will be resigning from the Tumbler Ridge Health Center effective September 1, 2026,” writes Pacholuk. “I plan to continue to service the community and will work towards re-opening primary care services under a different clinic model.”
What that means is not known yet. If a patient wants to stick with the Tumbler Ridge Medical Clinic, she says, patients records will be maintained. However, those who wish to continue care with Dr Pacholuk can transfer over as well. “During the transition period, if you need primary care services please reach out to the Tumbler Ridge Health Centre.”
She says Northern Health is actively trying to recruit additional doctors to work at the Health Centre, and has ongoing locum support. In addition, the Northern Health Virtual Clinic—which she was the medical lead on—is open from 10 am to 10 pm, 7 days a week by calling 1-844-645-7811.
Dr Charles Helm, who is no longer actively practicing as a doctor but remains active in promoting Tumbler Ridge as a place for doctors to come, says that things have changed for the worse in the last few years. “Until six years ago there was no word ‘diversion’,” he says. “It had to be invented because, to my knowledge, it had never happened before that. And now we’re just at the point, ‘oh there’s another diversion. We’re on diversion again. Here we go again.’ It’s amazing how this just becomes the new norm.”
It’s not just Tumbler Ridge and Hudson’s Hope, he says, but all across the north. I’m hearing they’re having issues in Fort Nelson as well. It really is time to sound the alarm. You get a vicious cycle developing. Work life balance is gone. And so physicians that might otherwise have wanted to come and work here say, ‘I don’t want to go there, because there’s no work life balance. And maybe because of the inferior state of healthcare there could be some complaints to the medical college, so why would I go there?’ So you get into these vicious cycles and the worse it gets, the worse it gets.”
At the recent conference held in Tumbler Ridge (story last issue), he says they celebrated the joys of rurality but they also confronted the challenges of rurality for new doctors considering working in the north. “We talked about emergency room closures and mental health crises and things like this. But at least we’re trying.”
Helm is the co-chair of the South Peace Division of Family Practice. He says this organization and others like it are working very hard to try and advocate for physicians but also for recruitment and retention.
He says things are always in a state of flux. “A few years ago, we could say we were about the only community with enough physicians. We had four. But that’s gone down to three and down to two and down to one. It might be going down to zero. How can this be? It’s unprecedented. This is a catastrophe that is looming and we need to be aware of it.”
He says that all the doctors that have left have all left for good reasons. “But it just shows how fragile communities can be and how quickly you can go from being well supplied with physicians to having none. Over the last decade, other communities have been through this, Burns Lake has been through this. Mackenzie has been through this. And they’ve come through and survived. And there are physicians coming to Tumbler Ridge, but it’s still a long time off, because there’s a rigorous program that incoming physicians have to go through. So we’re looking at February 2027 for the first one to arrive. That’s a long time ahead. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a long way away and we just have to get through this next period.
“Patients know this is not okay. This is not okay for Canada. This is not okay for BC. And we need to be totally upfront with our patients. I feel very sorry for my colleagues in the Health Authority, because there are many of them who are trying really hard to make things better. But it’s just this awful situation which has developed, which we are confronting. And many of us can legitimately ask, how did we get here?
“I’ve been warning everyone for 15 years that there have been storm clouds on the horizon. When you are in an administrative capacity, it’s easy to say ‘we just have to get through the next week, the next month, the next year,’ rather than thinking long term. But now ‘the long term’ thing has become the present and that is very worrisome.”
While the District and Northern Health have come to an agreement to restore 24/7 coverage in the emergency department, that becomes difficult with the loss of all the full-time doctors at the clinic. Even with the emergency department only being open 11 hours a day, it still has seen diversions, the most recent happening June 22 for three hours.
The first of two new physicians is expected to arrive early next year, while a second is expected by mid-2027, which—barring any other changes—will bring the clinic up to three resident doctors.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
