The Mayor of Merritt has confirmed that a coalition of local politicians around the province are “getting the band back together” to push for better healthcare coverage in rural areas.
With his own community having faced three Emergency Room shutdowns since just before Christmas, Merritt Mayor Mike Goetz says he’s going to chair the BC Rural Health Alliance, which will include elected municipal leaders from Vancouver Island, the Kootenay’s, and the Southern Interior to begin with.
Speaking on the NL Noon Report, Goetz says their first plan is to find out, from the various health authorities, what is behind the continual closures of emergency rooms across the province.
“Is it a workplace issue? Is it a personnel issue? What is the issue that is going on? Is it a lack of doctors? The lack of nurses? Or is it shifts that don’t want to be taken?” questioned Goetz.
“When we are talking about Merritt and Clearwater and Ashcroft and then as far away as the island, that is a concern, we should all wake up and kind of look at this, I mean your emergency room has been closed for over a year? There has to be some sort of political will to deal with this situation, and I am just not seeing it right now.”
Goetz says once they get that information, the Alliance intends to take their concerns directly to Health Minister Adrian Dix, saying he doesn’t intend to wait until the next UBCM conference in September.
“[We plan to] state our position, our concerns, and this can’t be news to him,” Goetz said. “He’s on TV every night looking shell-shocked over the whole thing most of the time.”
The Health Care Alliance was originally formed by Clearwater Mayor, Merlin Blackwell, before the last municipal election amid the continued shutdowns of his ER, but it lost steam after some of its members failed to be re-elected last October.
Blackwell says the return of the the alliance is welcome news for communities like his.
“It was very effective in a few different ways. The first one is that we came together and we compared notes,” he said, on the NL Morning News.
“Just the fact that we were comparing notes of how we were being treated by different health authorities and even with the sub-regions of the health authorities on the amount of information that we were getting, solutions to problems that we coming forward in our communities, the fact that we can go back to the people we were working within our communities was incredibly powerful and useful.”
Blackwell says he is happy to take a step back and help mentor other elected leaders who want to fix local healthcare issues.
“I am so busy right now, I won’t be the leader of this band, getting the band back together, but I am more than happy to mentor and connect people and then be part of the advisory group to this to give my experience in this situation,” he added.
“We are already starting to connect but I think we need to all be in one virtual room to have the conversation together and then take it even to a higher level with things like hospital boards. These little revelations of how things are different region to region within the ‘BC Healthcare System’ is very interesting to me.”
-With Files from Abby Zieverink & Victor Kaisar