Emergency medical care is once again available in Merritt, after Interior Health was forced to close the Nicola Valley Hospital’s emergency room overnight Friday.

“Emergency services will be unavailable from 7 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 20 to 8 a.m., Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024,” said Interior Health on Friday.

This represents the 20th closure of the Hospital’s Emergency Department through 2024.

Interior Health has not said why it made the decision.

But as in previous shutdowns, the Health Authority recommended people make the over hour-long drive into Kamloops to find non-critical medical help.

Those in immediate distress were told to call 911.

“People in the community who need life-threatening emergency care (i.e., chest pains, difficulty breathing, severe bleeding) should always call 911 for transport to the nearest available and appropriate facility,” says Interior Health in each of its public advisories about local emergency room closures.

The “nearest available and appropriate facility” for the BC Ambulance Service is Royal Inland Hospital, which means adding to the workloads and patient wait times at the Kamloops facility.

Royal Inland is also where those in medical need from the Lillooet region are told to go — a 2 hour drive — when their hospital’s emergency room is shut down.

Merritt closure latest alignment to “shutdown list”

Merritt Mayor Mike Goetz had warned in early October there could be as many as 30 closures of the Nicola Valley Hospital Emergency Department to close out 2024, based on information he says came from someone inside Interior Health.

“We do have people who work on the inside that are concerned about the way the hospital situation is going,” Goetz told Radio NL after the shutdown of the local emergency room in late September, which began as a 25 hour closure from Sunday into Monday, but was then extended through Monday and into Tuesday.

“They do give us information, because they’re very unhappy with the way that a health system is going.  They’re also giving us a warning,” said Goetz.

The information about the potential closures was based on long-term staff scheduling.

This latest closure of the Nicola Valley Hospital Emergency Room is the 5th “hit” on the dates provided on the “shutdown list.”

The rest have been avoided, including one at the last minute, shortly after Goetz’s public revelation.

Information change from Interior Health

The ability to try to find both current, and background information, related to emergency room closures in Interior Health has recently become more difficult.

Interior Health has stopped publicly detailing the rationale behind local emergency room shutdowns as part of its media advisories.

The apparent policy change seems to have been implemented at the end of October.

Meanwhile, tracking information on previous closures has also become more of a challenge.

A change on the front page layout of Interior Health’s media resource page has removed the date stamps on the links to the various news releases.

Instead, a “time to read” notification has been substituted.

It’s not clear when that change was made.

“Time to read” advisories are used mostly by online news publications as marketing tools to convince readers their time is important.

Emergency Room closures have become routine in many smaller BC communities, which struggle to recruit and retain medical professionals.

Interior Health has been working through plans to try to keep medical staff in those communities, with some success.

However, the rural ER closures has been a political weight on the NDP government, which only has a handful of MLA’s in its caucus from outside south coast region.

The lack of headway on rural health care staffing is believed to have been a factor in Premier David Eby shuffling long-time Health Minister Adrian Dix out of portfolio and shifting in Josie Osbourne, who was the former Mayor of Tofino.