While lamenting this week’s shutdown of his community’s emergency room services due to staffing issues, the Mayor of Barriere says the bigger concern for him is the status of local ambulances.
Noting anyone who suffers a serious injury or medical condition is more often directed to Kamloops, rather than the local emergency room, almost immediately, Ward Stamer says the biggest concern his community has right now is whether there’s an ambulance available to get them there.
He says one if his biggest frustrations is a lack of fore-warning from BC Emergency Health Services, should the ambulances in his community be elsewhere.
“When something like last Thursday comes along, where we’ve got a fully-staffed ambulance, and they end up basically stealing it to Kamloops, that’s not right. And we’ve got no way of knowing that until something happens,” said Stamer. “We don’t know what we have, because BC Ambulance Service isn’t telling us what the level of service is today, or tomorrow. And at the same time, we’ve got other challenges as well.”
Last week saw an infant die of cardiac arrest in Barriere while the local ambulance was not in the community, an incident which BC EHS says it is reviewing, but not commenting on specifically.
Stamer says the shortfalls in local health coverage, and in particular the rules surrounding patient transport, is something he and other community leaders in the region plan to bring to the attention of the BC government.
“We’re having discussions with the UBCM [Union of BC Municipalities] Executive right now, and trying to put together a quick ‘mayors caucus’ so we can have this conversation with the [Health] Ministry, with BC Ambulance Service, to see if we can come up with some short-term and long-term solutions.”
He says one of the issues they hope to address is the ability of first responders, such as fire fighters, to transport patients to a medical facility.
“We’ve got to change that, and we’ve got to change that now so that we can have the wheels rolling,” argues Stamer. “If they have to meet the Ambulance Service service half-way to the hospital, or if they have to go all the way to the hospital, they can.”
