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It’s just another day, another series of emergency department closures at hospitals in the B.C. Interior.
Interior Health issued an advisory Sunday saying the emergency room at South Okanagan General Hospital in Oliver will be shuttered from 3 p.m. until Monday at 7 a.m. because of limited doctor availability.
Another notice posted soon after warned Nicola Valley Hospital in Merritt is also closing its ER overnight because of a shortage of nurses.
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The statements said patients in Oliver and area should go to Penticton Regional Hospital for emergency services through Monday morning, and those in the Merritt area were told to venture to Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops.
Interior Health has issued a stream of closure notices in recent weeks for hospitals in Oliver, Williams Lake, Merritt, Creston and Clearwater. Though the reason isn’t always announced it’s usually due to shortages of emergency room physicians and other health-care workers.
Most health facilities being shut down are supposed to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Earlier this month, Premier David Eby said the NDP government is working to address the shortages, though he said so at an announcement of a new medical school at SFU Surrey that won’t be up and running until 2026.
Health Minister Adrian Dix said at that news conference that another issue is that double the number of health care workers are calling in sick compared with before the pandemic. He didn’t say whether those absences can be attributed to a recent uptick in COVID-19 cases.
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The situation in the B.C. Interior has gotten so bad that Merritt Mayor Michael Goetz publicly produced a bill to the province to reimburse that city’s taxpayers for 19 closures at Merritt’s hospital ER in the past two years.
As for the South Okanagan and Nicola Valley closures and others in recent weeks, Interior Health advises anyone who needs life-threatening emergency care to call 911 for transport to the nearest available health facility. If you’re unsure whether that’s warranted, you can call HealthLink B.C. at 811 for non-emergency information from nurses, dietitians and pharmacists, 24/7.
With files from Vaughn Palmer
jruttle@postmedia.com
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