On Thursday, July 31, The Tumbler Ridge Emergency Department was not open, and, while no reason was given, traditionally these closures are due to lack of staff.
While none of the other services in the clinic were effected, it meant that anyone who needed emergency care had to go to Chetwynd or Dawson Creek.
The Tumbler Ridge Health Centre’s emergency department is typically open Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 5 pm. After hours, emergency care is provided on an on-call basis.
“Access to Emergency Departments (EDs) is an important part of community infrastructure, and disruptions in service are very challenging for people and communities to bear,” writes Josie Osborne, Minister of Health for the Province, in a letter earlier this month to the board of the Peace River Regional District (PRRD). “I share your concerns about emergency department service interruptions and want to assure the PRRD that every effort is made to avoid them before the difficult decision is made to have a temporary unplanned closure of an ED and divert patients to other available sites within the region.”
She says the primary reason for ED diversions is staffing shortages. “The temporary closure of an ED is an absolute last resort when there are no health care providers who can manage a patient who arrives at the health care facility extremely unwell and who needs hands-on care. In this event, the only way to manage such a patient in the safest way possible is to quickly divert them to the closest hospital capable of managing those types of issues. While diversions are never ideal, they are unfortunately sometimes necessary to ensure the best and safest care is provided to patients.”
She says Northern Health is working hard on recruiting new health care workers. She says some things being done include a Provincial Rural Retention Incentive, which provides retention bonuses to health care workers in eligible rural and remote communities, a Provincial Rural and Remote Recruitment Incentive, which provides signing bonuses of up to $30,000 for specific high needs vacancies in Northern Health, which come with a 24-month return of service, GoHealthBC, a service (initiated in Northern Health that has since expanded to include communities in Interior Health and Island Health) that employs 436 nurses delivering services in rural and remote communities to reduce reliance on agency nursing services and Emergency Care BC, a network of provincial partners to drive improvements across the health care system, including support for hybrid models of care on EDs where virtual care could be delivered and help optimize physician capacity.
“Working weeks and even months ahead, most staffing situations that could lead to an ED diversion are mitigated significantly in advance of when the diversion would have taken place. Even when an ED diversion has been declared, health authorities make every effort to try to fill the shift and prevent the closure.”
And while there has been 20 closures around the Peace Region this year, for a total of 366 hours, she says this has been improving since last summer. “Northern Health has seen a reduction in ED service interruptions compared to 2023,” says Osborne. “However, I recognize there is still much work to do to further reduce ED closures and to strengthen BC’s public health care system.”
She says the province is working to train and hire more health care workers in the north. This includes working with the College of Physicians and Surgeons to provide immediate provisional licenses for those trained in Canada and within six weeks for those trained in comparable regions, like the US and UK, and hiring new Physician Assistants to work in EDs, which will help alleviate staff shortages (there are currently four Physician Assistant postings in Northern Health).
In addition, the province is expanding training, establishing a new medical school at Simon Fraser University in Surrey, opening next fall, adding 582 new nursing student seats, a tuition-waiver program, and expanding the UBC Medical School by 128 seats.
“We are also taking action to free up emergency departments for those who need them by continuing to build the primary care system and connecting more people to family doctors, opening Urgent and Primary Care Centres, and allowing pharmacists to treat minor ailments. Together, all these actions mean there are more health care providers working in hospitals to prevent emergency department diversions.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
