Health minister makes pledge to visit hospital to get 1st-hand look at problems

Community looking for permanent full-time emergency doctors

B.C.’s health minister is pledging to visit Oliver “within a week Friday” to get a better look at emergency room operations at South Okanagan General Hospital.

Adrian Dix made the commitment in the B.C. Legislature Tuesday afternoon while responding to a question from Boundary-Similkameen MLA Linda Larson.

He also hinted at the placement of at least one urgent care centre within the riding.

“It’s my intention, within I think a week Friday, to go to the community and hopefully have a chance to meet with the doctors,” the minister said.

“I would invite the member to join me in those meetings, because I think that that’s such a central question for the community.”

“I’m hoping to go there in a short period of time and be in touch, to engage with people personally on the question.”

Larson, who sits as an Opposition member of the Liberal Party, said the South Okanagan community is looking for permanent full-time emergency doctors to remove the ER burden from local physicians.

“Normally, it serves about 10,000 people, regular residents, but in the summer and tourist season, up to 30,000,” said Larson of the hospital.

“It’s a 24-hour emergency (room), but the doctors who work it are just the local GPs who also run their own practices.”

Larson noted both the towns of Osoyoos and Oliver, with Councils that have repeatedly expressed concerns with delivery irregularities at the SOGH, are looking for help from the provincial ministry.

“They’re looking for an APP for the hospital, so that we can pay differently and have permanent full-time emergency doctors,” she said. “I’d like to know whether you have been able to move forward on that at all.”

An APP, Larson later explained, is an Alternate Payment Plan, funded directly from Ministry of Health that would be administered by the Interior Health Authority.

The minister indicated he understood the issue is “obviously something” that has preoccupied the whole region, “both in the period around the election, as we know, but also really for a number of years before that.”

“This is a significant operational question and one I take seriously,” Dix replied. “I know that we have an outstanding CEO at Interior Health who’s working on those questions as well.”

Dix also spoke to an NDP plan to build urgent care centres across the province — and hinted one or more might be in the works for the riding.

“While one goal of urgent care centres might be to relieve pressure on emergency rooms, the primary goal of urgent care centres is to address what for many people is a lack of (a family physician),” he explained.

“Many people are not attached to a GP. This is particularly true in the member’s constituency. This is one of the things that we’d like to talk to the community about and get more informed about. I invite the member to be part of that.”

In April, during the provincial election campaign, Premier John Horgan pledged to build urgent care centres across the province to improve access to health care.

“We will build urgent family care centres that will be a go-between between the walkin clinics that we have today and the clogged emergency rooms currently,” said Horgan during a campaign stop in Burnaby.

“We’re going to build them as we need them in the areas that have the most demand. That’s where emergency rooms are the most clogged.”