Five B.C. hospital emergency rooms were closed during the long weekend due to being short staffed, according to several news releases which cited “limited physician availability.”
The Interior Health Authority announced that the emergency rooms at 100 Mile District, Nicola Valley, Lillooet, Cariboo Memorial and South Okanagan hospitals were all closed as a result of the staffing shortage, however, most have since reopened.
The closures follow a growing trend for B.C. hospitals that William Lake Coun. Scott Nelson has called a “worrisome” situation.
“Instead of [the Interior Health] posting when they’re closing, how about they just post when they’re open,” Nelson told CBC News over the long weekend.
Emergency room closures at both 100 Mile House and Williams Lake forced residents to have to travel to neighbouring communities for help, according to Nelson.
“There are 10 to 15,000 people that don’t have a doctor [in our region], so they rely on the emergency department for services,” he said.
Emergency room interruptions in the region have occurred as many as 28 times in July, with 10 of those closures happening at Cariboo Memorial Hospital in Williams Lake.
The problem extends as far back as 2022 for the province, with 13 emergency rooms in rural hospitals being closed for a combined total of four months and an additional 10 rooms were closed last year over staffing shortages.
However, it’s not B.C. alone that is suffering from this issue, Ontario hospitals are also at a breaking point due to understaffing and burnout among healthcare workers is escalating.
A study, titled “Running on Empty,” conducted in collaboration with the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions-Canadian Union of Public Employees interviewed 26 healthcare workers across the province and reviewed existing literature on the healthcare sector and the effectiveness of hospitals and their workers.
“One of the foundations of overwork is understaffing, which leads to heavier workloads, poorer care, and increased strain from health and safety risks. In turn, they are experiencing negative physical and mental effects, including stress and anxiety,” reads the study. “Burnout and negative coping strategies have also increased, and patient care is compromised.”
According to the study, Canada had seven hospital beds per 1,000 people in 1976. By 2024, that number had fallen to 2.6 beds per 1,000 people.
“The depletion of hospital staffing in Ontario is worse than in most of the other provinces,” reads the study, which cited that Canadian provinces average 18% more staff per capita than Ontario.
A previous report by the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that Canada had the least amount of doctors per capita among OECD countries.
In addition to B.C. and Ontario, Quebec’s healthcare system has become so strained that patients seeking urgent care are simply walking out of emergency rooms due to excessive wait times.
Between April 2023 and February 2024, a total of 3,265,349 patients visited emergency rooms in Quebec. Of those patients, 376,460, or 11.5%, left before seeing a physician.
“That amounts to 1,140 Quebecers a day who were thus abandoned by the system,” reads a study by the Montreal Economic Institute.