ER in Oliver doesn’t have enough doctors to stay open all weekend

If you need emergency room care this weekend, you may have to bypass Oliver to get it.

Reports from the South Okanagan General Hospital (SOGH) say the Interior Health Authority will decide this morning if the ER will be closed Saturday evening and much of Sunday.

As of today, the unit does not have the physician coverage necessary to keep it open after 6 p.m. Saturday.

The hospital’s emergency department may also be closed on ensuing weekends unless physician care is provided by the health authority.

Calls to SOGH administrator Carl Meadows to clarify the reports went unanswered.

However, Dr. Peter Entwistle, the hospital’s former chief of staff, earlier this week confirmed the hospital might be without physician coverage for its emergency department this weekend.

In the past, he said, he would have covered the open ER shifts, but notes he is unavailable this weekend due to other responsibilities.

“I was working for a third of all the nights for the first three months of this year and worked 10 of the 12 weekends,” he said, concerned some observers might think he was declining to work the open shifts this weekend for political purposes.

“In the past nine days I worked five nights. I have been advocating forever and pretty much covering the ER.”

Gayle Duteil, president of the BC Nurses Union and an acute care nurse who calls South Okanagan her “home hospital,” said it would be improper for Interior Health — or others — to fault Dr. Entwistle for a potential ER closure this weekend.

“That will become routine now that Peter Entwistle isn’t working six days a week,” she said in an interview earlier this week.

“He covered all of those shifts. That will become the new norm for South Okanagan General.”

Dr. Entwistle had served as the hospital’s chief of staff, a position from which he resigned in March to protest what appears to be a decision made to close 25 per cent of the hospital’s 24 medical ward beds.

Dr. Entwistle expressed a concern closing those beds would result in patients having to remain in the hospital’s emergency room for extended periods. That, he explained, would lead to increased risk of death among patients visiting the ER.

It’s a position to which Duteil also subscribes.

“Very seldom are we at 18 beds. Often we are at 20,” she said. “Now they’re going to physically pull out the beds. I’ve seen this in other health authorities; they then stack and rack in the emergency department.”

In the Fraser Valley, she noted, 95 beds were closed last year.

“They (the Fraser Health Authority) now have 80 to 100 admits in Surrey Memorial Emerg (ency) every day,” she said. “The same thing will happen at South Okanagan — if it’s able to stay open — because Dr. Entwistle routinely covers shifts in the emergency department and they will be short.”

Duteil said she’s concerned the IHA will be unable to find enough physician coverage to keep the emergency department open and will opt for a permanent closing.

“Their responsibility is to staff that hospital and they will find very quickly without the support of Dr. Entwistle they will be unable to,” she said. “They will have no choice but to close that department.

“A rural emergency department is certainly more unpredictable than a city emergency department,” she added. “You have to be prepared for anything that comes through that door.

“Why would the patients of the South Okanagan deserve anything less than what Kelowna has?”