For the second successive weekend, the Clearwater emergency department will be closed because of a lack of available staff.

Interior Health says the closure began at 4:00 p.m. Friday, Oct 15, adding it will last until 7 a.m. Monday, Oct. 18 – a 63 hour long closure.

People are being told to call 9-1-1 in case of an emergency or to head to the ER at Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops. They’re also being told to call HealthLink B.C. at 8-1-1 if they are not sure whether they need emergency care.

It comes after a 47 hour long closure over the Thanksgiving long weekend, something Mayor Merlin Blackwell says was compounded by a region-wide ambulance staff shortage.

“It led to a lot of concern among the local healthcare community by not having ambulances available to the same level or the same frequency that we would normally have, and then [more concern because] theoretically, in a case of an emergency, we’d have to send somebody into Kamloops because our ER was closed,” he told NL News this week.

“Not having that ER to take them to locally probably exacerbated things regionally, for sure.”

Blackwell says the Clearwater emergency room at the Helmcken Memorial Hospital needs at least two registered nurses on site at all times. The community, he says, is short two doctors, one nurse, and almost two full-time-equivalent home-care nurses.

“Our local health care management team has been able to hire one new RN but we do have a shortage of several positions,” Blackwell said.

“We do have a recruitment-retention committee that’s jointly run between council and various healthcare providers and administrators in town. So we’re doing a lot of work to try to make that happen… A lot more work goes into it then you really ever see reward for.”

The ER in Clearwater was also closed for five nights in August because of a staffing shortage.

– With files from Colton Davies