This business of closing down the emergency department at South Okanagan General Hospital has to stop.
It’s quite serious when a hospital has to close its doors on a Friday night or an entire weekend because it can’t find any doctors to cover a shift.
Oliver resident Jim Stewart hit the nail on the head last week when he said the hospital should look at alternatives, such as hiring nurse practitioners (with emergency room experience) to cover the shortfall.
This was suggested during the provincial election campaign, but it doesn’t look like the Liberals took it to heart.
If doctors don’t want to or can’t cover these shifts, bring in qualified nurses to do it.
Maybe if the government offered local physicians some decent compensation we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Doctors make more money in their private practice than they do covering the emergency department at SOGH, so there’s really no financial incentive to do so. And reportedly physicians at Penticton Regional Hospital are compensated more than Oliver doctors are here. Where’s the fairness in that?
Back to the issue, the government should seriously implement a program to utilize nurse practitioners in our emergency department. It has reportedly worked well in other jurisdictions.
We need to do something before our hospital loses more departments and more resources. Will SOGH be relegated to being no more than a walk-in clinic some day? Perish the thought. We pay handsomely for health care, so where is the money going?
We fear that one of these times, when the emergency department is closed, there will be an incident that requires immediate medical intervention. With no doctors in the house, paramedics are left to deal with the patient who is 30 minutes away from Penticton Regional Hospital. A cardiac arrest patient doesn’t have 30 minutes, let alone 10.
The provincial government has an obligation to resolve these temporary closures before something bad happens. An emergency department should never be void of doctors. It makes no sense. But it does make a mockery out of health care in Oliver.
Lyonel Doherty, editor
