The former Sagebrush Lodge is one of the options suggested for an Osoyoos Community Health Centre. One scenario calls for Interior Health to partially demolish and upgrade the existing building and lease it to the town. A second option is for the town to develop its own facility on the vacant lot to the south of the building. (Richard McGuire photo)

A new Osoyoos Community Health Centre could open at the site of the former Sagebrush Lodge if the next council follows through on a study presented to the outgoing council on Monday.

Ralf Nielsen, representing Colliers Project Leaders, gave an overview and top-line conclusions from the Osoyoos Community Health Centre Feasibility Study at council’s committee of the whole meeting.

The report narrows down the possible locations for a health centre to several options and makes general suggestions about services that could be offered and the building sizes to accommodate them.

“I think people need to realize we’re not going to start breaking ground on this this morning,” said Mayor Sue McKortoff, implying that the next council will need to do considerable work if it wishes to move forward.

Barry Romanko, town chief administrative officer, referred to the report as a “foundation document,” which is what the town needed to help identify costs.

The study came about after members of the community last year campaigned for Osoyoos to get a walk-in medical clinic.

A group calling itself Residents for Healthcare gathered well over 1,000 names on a petition in April 2017 calling for the town to address the shortage of family physicians and lack of a walk-in clinic.

One councillor observed after Monday’s meeting that none of the people expressing concerns last year attended the report’s announcement.

In his presentation, Nielsen referred to the proposed facility as an Urgent Primary Care Centre (UPCC).

A key function, he said, would be to relieve the service demand pressure on the emergency room at South Okanagan General Hospital (SOGH) in Oliver by handling less urgent matters.

Visits to the emergency room at SOGH are overwhelmingly for less urgent and non-urgent matters, Nielsen said, showing a graph of emergency visits by triage level from 2016-17.

The chart showed that more than 9,000 visits were classed as Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS) 4, or less urgent, and more than 3,100 more were classed as CTAS 5, or non-urgent.

Such visits “are dramatically higher at SOGH in Oliver, 20 km away from Osoyoos, compared to other larger facilities in the region,” the report said.

In fact, 70.4 per cent of emergency department visits at SOGH were less urgent or non-urgent compared to only 39.2 per cent of visits in the eight largest facilities operated by Interior Health.

“Emergency department visits in the Southern Okanagan are nearly double the visits for all Interior Health,” the report said. “Clearly there is a lack of access to local urgent primary care services in Osoyoos and it is placing unnecessary strain on facilities in surrounding communities. A new primary care clinic located in Osoyoos with capacity to manage Urgent Care would help address imbalances in emergency department utilization within the Southern Okanagan Local Health Area.”

In the discussion following the presentation, Councillor Mike Campol noted that there are already periodic closures of the emergency department in Oliver due to physician shortages. And he wondered whether an Osoyoos Community Health Centre would exacerbate those shortages by “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Nielsen said the UPCC model would ideally provide services of eight physicians, one nurse practitioner, one primary care nurse and one mental health clinician.

There would be capacity for other services and the focus would be on health promotion, prevention and chronic disease management.

It would provide walk-in urgent care, but not emergency care, which would be handled by hospitals.

Much of the report deals with location options and several of these are eliminated due to physical characteristics of the property or other better use for the land.

Two of the preferred options would locate the facility at the former Sagebrush Lodge and one would put it on town-owned property on Maple Drive in East Osoyoos.

Those options are:

  • Interior Health would partially demolish and upgrade Sagebrush Lodge and lease it to the town;
  • The town would develop beside Sagebrush Lodge and own the facility;
  • The town would develop a facility on Maple Drive and own it.

Nielsen noted that whatever option is chosen, it would need to be attractive to doctors. As well, there are options to recover costs by including condominium units at the facility.

RICHARD McGUIRE

Osoyoos Times