The emergency room at Port Alberni’s West Coast General Hospital (WCGH) on Vancouver Island could be closed for most of August and September due to ongoing staff shortages, CBC News has learned. An employee at WCGH, speaking on the condition of anonymity, warned that the ER could be closed for eight hours a day if a solution is not found to cover hospital shifts. While the ER is currently operating, the employee said it narrowly avoided closing in July. The ER in Port Alberni serves a city of over 18,000 residents and typically sees 60 to 80 visits per day. The official, a health care professional, said if the ER were to close, people would have to travel an hour and 15 minutes to Nanaimo or nearly two hours to Tofino for emergency care — resulting in a three-hour period when an ambulance would not be available for other calls to the community. The Port Alberni Fire Department and police detachment said they have been alerted to the possible disturbance. Island Health said in a statement that there are currently no planned outages at WCGH and that the closure will occur “as a last resort […] after every possible mitigation strategy has been explored and exhausted.” Port Alberni provides emergency services to a city of more than 18,000 residents and typically sees 60 to 80 calls a day. (Google Maps) “Island Health is actively working to ensure the availability of emergency services in the Alberni Valley region and beyond,” the statement read in part. An ER closure in Port Alberni would be the latest in a series of temporary ER shutdowns in small communities. Earlier this spring, emergency rooms in Port McNeill – in the northern region of the island – as well as in the interior and northeast of the province were closed on short notice because doctors were not available to cover shifts. Just Monday, the ER at Merritt’s Nicola Valley Hospital in the Interior was briefly shut down after an ER doctor called in sick. It reopened at 8am the next day. Interior Health has led people who need urgent care to access Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops or Kelowna General Hospital, about an hour and a half drive away. Speaking at an unrelated press conference Monday, Health Minister Adrian Dix said he was aware of the closure in Merritt, but did not immediately comment on potential closures in Port Alberni. “We’re going to continue to do what we’ve been doing — which is recruiting and building resources into our health care system,” he said. “We’re asking our health care system to do more, and the health care system is responding.”
Doctors “in their darkest hour”
Dr. Ramneek Dosanjh, president of Doctors of BC, said the closures are “incredibly troubling” for both health care providers and patients, and show the lack of equity in health care environments in rural and urban communities. “The emergency room setting is usually a life-saving measure, and if we say we can’t have that, we can’t provide that in a community, what kind of care are we saying we can provide? That’s devastating in a country like ours and a province like ours,” he said. “It shouldn’t matter if you’re sitting in Terrace or Dawson Creek or Port Alberni or Merritt — you should have access to early care and intervention.” Dosanjh said two years into the pandemic and six years into the toxic drug crisis, doctors across the province are facing burnout and an unprecedented burden on their mental health. “It’s not easy for doctors not to show up or nurses not to come, those are the decisions that are made in their darkest hour,” Dosanjh said. According to the WCGH official, keeping the Port Alberni emergency room open would require doctors to work 12- to 16-hour shifts for weeks on end — a workload doctors simply cannot handle.
“We can’t take doctors out of the air”
Merritt Mayor Linda Brown said when a doctor calls in sick, there’s not much the city can do to keep the ER open. The city also has limited capacity to work on recruiting and retaining doctors. “There’s nothing we can do at this point in time. We can’t take doctors out of the air. We have to deal with this as a community,” Brown said. “We are unable to attract nurses and doctors at the moment, we rely on our overall health care system to provide them for us.” About four hours northwest of Port Alberni, Port McNeill Mayor Gaby Wickstrom said her community is bracing for more emergency service outages this summer. Port McNeill Hospital has for the past few months had its emergency room temporarily closed or on diversion — meaning walk-ins to the emergency room are handled while patients arriving by ambulance are redirected to Port Hardy, half an hour away. “We’re always concerned because we’re short-staffed without extras,” Wickstrom said, adding that in a rural community, having even one health care worker sick can lead to a shutdown. He said closing the Port Hardy and Port McNeill emergency rooms at the same time would result in patients being redirected to Campbell River, two hours away. “We’ve been told that from time to time we may end up with either diversion or closure because that’s just the nature of the staffing crisis we’re in,” he said. “It will probably continue for a few months, it’s not an overnight fix.”
