One of the Tournament Capital’s largest maternity clinics is slated to close this summer due to a lack of doctors.

The Thompson Region Family Obstetrics Clinic, located inside Royal Inland Hospital, is no longer accepting patients with due dates past the end of July.

Dr. Shaun Davis has been with the clinic for about five years and tells NL News it is not a new problem but one that has been building for many years. He notes there was a short closure back in 2019 when a number of physicians retired out of community care, but with some new doctors moving to the city, the clinic reopened.

“Basically since October we’ve been at critically low levels of physician shortages,” Davis said, on the NL Morning News. “So the long standing issue in maternity care throughout the province is that the number of physicians that are doing family practiced based obstetrics is gradually declining.

“We used to have 23 in the community back in early 2000 and we have now dropped down to, outside of the Chairfolk clinic, there’s really only at most three providers.”

“One of the challenges we’ve had with recruitment is we have a difficult time getting the word out that we’re actually really struggling,” Davis added.

“A lot of physician recruitment happens word-of-mouth and so as the clinic closes, there has been more publicity than maybe we’d hoped for, but there are also positives to that. So people across the province are going to hear about and so maybe we will garner some interest of people coming here to check out the clinic.”

Davis says, just like the situation back in 2019, there is a possibility that the clinic could reopen in the future, if more care providers choose to come to Kamloops.

“The long term co-ordination stuff is Interior Health’s responsibility to start to look for other areas that can handle obstetrical care,” he said. “We are just one of the components that does obstetrical care here. Now that being said, we are trying very hard to make it so this doesn’t actually happen.”

“This has happened before where we’ve had to temporarily close our doors cause of staffing shortages and if we can get staffing it gives us the opportunity to reopen. Maybe that will be in a step wise approach where we say we have got some coverage to get us through August and then maybe we open August due dates and then maybe we can get more coverage and get through September,” Davis added.

“I mean in a perfect world we would get new staff that want to stay and commit to working in the clinic and then we’d be able to open back up to full capacity.”

The TRFO has a core team of five physicians, two registered midwives, medical office assistants, and a registered nurse, and serves between 500 and 600 families per year, with approximately 50 to 60 deliveries per month. TRFO has traditionally had a no-refusal policy. Pregnant individuals are attached to the clinic from early pregnancy to six weeks postpartum.

In 2020, the TRFO clinic expanded their model to include two registered midwives, which helped to alleviate the perinatal shortage and improved postpartum care for TRFO patients, with the midwives’ focus being postpartum care.

The clinic has attempted to stabilize in several ways over the past 10 months while struggling to fill on-call shifts.

• Contingency planning meetings: TRFO meets regularly with IH Medical Affairs, Thompson Region Division of Family Practice, RIH Leadership, OB and Midwifery Department Heads.
• Recruitment: The Division of Family Practice is supporting recruitment efforts for locums and permanent positions through managing postings on HealthMatch BC, social media, and the Division, Interior Health and BC Family Doctors websites.
• Locum packages: Welcome incentives, income guarantees, travel expenses and stipend.
• Advocacy for a new payment contract

NL News has reached out to Interior Health for comment and is awaiting a response.