“I’m sure everyone noticed that we’re on diversion again today and tomorrow,” says Chris Norbury, addressing a crowd of about fifty who have gathered in support of Emergency Room coverage.
“It’s open tomorrow!” someone yells from the crowd. “Oh, it’s been changed,” Norbury continues. “That’s good. Glad we checked the website.
“But Dawson’s on diversion today. So if you’re having a medical emergency, check the website.
“It’s been one year,” he continues. “One full year since Northern Health closed our emergency room after hours. When that decision was made, our community stepped up. We wrote letters We told stories and we rallied together. We delivered 1,800 signatures to the province, telling them we would not accept losing our emergency care in our community.
“Because we stood together, Northern Health changed the permanent closure into a temporary closure. But as Dr Helm warned us, the most permanent thing is temporary. Here we are. One year later. Still waiting.”
Emergencies, he says, do not happen between nine and five. “Pain does not wait until morning. A child’s fever does not care whether our emergency room is open. A serious illness does not wait for office hours. And after 7pm, families in Tumbler Ridge are left with an impossible choice.
“We can call 911, wait for an ambulance, potentially be taken two hours away if Chetwynd or Dawson Creek is on diversion. Or we can put someone we love into a vehicle and drive those dark, icy, dangerous highways in the middle of the night ourselves, because we can get there faster.”
This, he says, is an unacceptable decision people here are being forced to make. “We understand there’s a shortage of doctors. We know this is a difficult problem. But a doctor shortage cannot become an excuse to ignore the people working on the front lines. Our healthcare professionals brought forward ideas that could have kept our emergency room open longer. Where they listened to? No.
“Why do so many healthcare professionals leave Tumbler Ridge? Because they’re not valued as we valued them. Health care must be centered around doctors, nurses, paramedics, laboratory staff, and other professionals who care for us every day. It must be centered about what they need and what they know their patients need. Health care cannot be controlled by administrators staring at spreadsheets and telling us why we do not deserve the same protection their own families have. A spreadsheet cannot tell you the fear of driving an injured loved one down an icy mountain highway. A spreadsheet cannot understand what it means to wonder if help will arrive on time. We understand, our doctors understand, our nurses understand, and decision makers at Northern Health and the Ministry of Health need to listen.
“We did not simply complain about this problem. We brought forward solutions. We told them about using virtual emergency physicians to support our health care professionals. We told them about industrial operators that have health care emergency rooms at site locations in modular treatment facilities, which we could have had our emergency open in days if not weeks. We showed the models that could have helped reopen our emergency room immediately.
“Now, one year later, we finally received some encouraging news. Discussions are beginning on how to reopen our emergency room 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s progress. We welcome it. But discussions are not enough. We cannot accept another year of meetings. We cannot accept another year of promises. We cannot accept another year of being told to wait while our families remain at risk. We need a plan. We need a timeline. We need action.
“And most importantly, Northern Health must listen to the people delivering health care in our community. Until our doctors, our nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare professionals feel heard, we will not escape this crisis. Until Northern Health’s actions prove that those professionals have not been hurt, we will not escape this crisis. Until they are given the people, the tools, the resources, and the time they need to care for us, we will not escape this crisis. We’re not asking for special treatment. We’re asking for safe, reliable emergency care in our own community.”
Norbury was joined by Dr. Charles Helm, who says it seems like a positive sign that Northern Health has said we are going to get 24/7 emergency care back. “That sounds good. It sounds as if through all of our actions, we won the battle.
“But,” says Helm, “a statement is not an action. We need action. We need the health authority’s feet held to the fire to deliver on these statements. That’s what we need. We’ve been suggesting virtual emergency room support ever since day one. So please do not be frightened by the term virtual.
“But virtual by itself is not the answer. It’s a step towards the answer. We know we haven’t got enough doctors at the moment. So virtual has got a huge role for us, but it’s not the answer. It’s a step in the right direction. As long as we see it for that, that’s fine.”
Helm says there are a number of medical reasons why having coverage in town is important.
“I’m going to focus on two,” he says. “When this decision was taken to close our emergency room, there were certain things that were not taken into account. There are three paved roads leaving town. In each case, you’ve got to climb a thousand feet, two thousand feet over a mountain pass to get anywhere. If you are unlucky enough to have a punctured lung—which happens about to one person a year in Tumbler Ridge—you’ll need a chest tube put in. But if we don’t have 24/7 in-person care by a doctor, who is going to put in the chest tube? Because without that chest tube, if you go over the mountain pass, you could die on the way. It’s has to do with air pressure changes. You need a chest tube.
A second example—and there are hundreds I could have chosen—but if you have a heart attack here, there’s a good chance that you might need what we call the clot-buster drug. I need to be assured that can be delivered in Tumbler Ridge because the quicker you give it, the better. If you wait an hour and a half to get to Dawson Creek, you’ve lost an hour and a half. If you give it here within 10–15 minutes of arrival, you can save that person’s life. That is what we do as doctors. If we lose that opportunity, it’s not good. It’s not acceptable care.
“The other thing I want to know: as we are considering virtual care, are we going to have X-Ray and lab after hours? It’s very limited what you can do as a physician on call, even if you’re there in person or if you’re there virtually and you haven’t got X-Ray lab. We need that.
“But what we need above anything else is Northern Health to come into the community and have an open house and be prepared to take our questions. That’s called transparency. That is what we need. And we need Northern Health—as Chris has said—to work with our local providers, be they doctors, nurses, lab techs, X-Ray tech, emergency responders, whatever. They need to work with us, to listen to us, please.
“At the moment we’re facing what seems very much like collapse. We’re having a situation where there are not enough locums. Our clinic is going to have to close for a week so that the one remaining physician can cover the emergency room day after day, night after night for a week. Is that healthy? No, it’s not. It means more diversions. It looks like collapse. And we have to ask why we are losing so many physicians. A couple of years ago I would go to conferences and I would say Tumbler Ridge was the one community that had enough physicians in the community to keep us going. Every other community was having shortages. And now we’re down from four to three to two to one, maybe to zero.
“Why is this happening? Why is it happening here? We need to ask these questions. And right now we’re in a survival mode.”
But it’s not all bad news, he says. “Yesterday, Chrissy Irving, our new health navigator for the Type 2 Diabetes remission project, was announced, and today is her first day of work. And we are creating a position, I hope within a few weeks, within a few months, for a kinesiologist. Not within the health authority, but here in Tumbler Ridge to work with her.
“These are things that we can do as a community and as your representatives, independent of all the challenges that the health authority faces And I don’t want to be in the health authorities shoes, I can tell you. They’ve got a very hard job to do. This very morning I’ve been attending a pilot project for hybrid care in Tumbler Ridge. Tumbler Ridge is this community that has been chosen for the pilot project. It says if we do nothing, more and more is going to become virtual and less and less in person. There’s this amazing research group from UNBC that just dropped into our laps. Here they are, telling us all about hybrid care and listening to us and wanting community input. Isn’t that amazing? That’s what we want. And we’re working so closely with our northern nations and our Indigenous partners. There’s such strength in that.”
Even better, says Helm, there are at least two physicians coming next year. “At least two. So we just have to survive this phase because it’s going to get better.”
After Helm, Mayor Darryl Krakowka spoke. He thanked Dr Helm for helping the District deal with Northern Health, of his own struggles dealing with Northern Health as a politician, but also as a resident.
“I was one of the people that did not go to an after-hours ER because ours wasn’t open,” says Krakowka, referring to an event from a number of months back.
“I Damn near died.
“I Damn near died in my truck outside the health centre, waiting for it to open. Nicole Noksana, same thing. There’s a gentleman back there. I met him in the Dawson Creek Hospital. He damn near died, too. All because we didn’t have after hours ER. We waited. Waited till the morning. We cannot accept that.
“That is not appropriate health care. I want to thank our nurses, our paramedics, all the allied healthcare professionals, because without them, we would be at ground zero. If it wasn’t for them, it’s people like me that would not be standing here today It was the nurses in that saved my life. Probably the gentleman standing at the back. They probably saved his life too.
“We need to push even more. Elected officials need to push. Residents need to push. We need lab and X-Ray after hours as well, not just a virtual doctor without lab or X-Ray. We need that as well, and I look forward to again hammering Northern Health.
“What I can do is promise you that we’re not going to stop. We’ve been told January for virtual care, but that was without a provincial election. Will it be pushed back to February? Is that going to be March? Or will it be June, July, or September of 2027? Do I believe that Northern Health is holding to their date? I don’t. They lied to you already. They told you it was it was okay for you to be transported by an ambulance out of this community and that’s good enough health care for Tumbler Ridge, and it’s not.”
After Krakowka, Stu Bell spoke (see editorial), and then Lydia Mannion, who says she is appalled at the care Tumbler Ridge residents have been receiving from Northern Health. “I am appalled at the disregard with which our community, as well as their own employees, have been treated. I have their fiscal statement of financial information. Page 72 of this document shows Ciro Panessa ‘s remuneration, which is over $400,000, plus $30,000 of expenses.
“Our premier—whether you agree with what he does or not—received $231,000 for the same period of time. Is Ciro really doing that much more for the province—for us here in the north—that he deserves over two hundred and fifty dollars an hour? I don’t think so.
“We were told that this is because they were raising their salaries to be in line with industry standards. Industry standards? There is a standard then of care that the people should be receiving. If you are expecting that you’re going to be remunerated to the tune of $400,000 for pencil pushing? I’m sorry. I do not think that someone who’s working in an office deserves to be paid almost four times more than nurses or other staff in the Health Centre.
“And yes, doctors want to be paid, but they also want quality of life. And yes, their starting salaries are between $350,000 and $400,000, but I think that they’re expecting to be treated with some dignity and respect by their employers.
“On February 5, 2025, my sister died, and my parents traveled to the hospital in Dawson Creek to see her, and it was a shock for them to meet Dr Ife in the hallway. The didn’t realize that doctors who work in Tumbler Ridge are often expected to cover staff shortages at other hospitals in the area, whether it’s in the middle of winter or in summer.
“Dr Ife had been traveling down those treacherous highways to go and provide care while people in town were being left without a doctor, and I don’t think that’s right, either for the doctors or for us here in the community. Northern Health needs to be accountable. We deserve care after dark. We deserve care in the wintertime. We deserve care during that golden hour. Rural lives matter.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
