B.C. mayor sends $84,000 bill to province for ER closures due to staffing shortages

Staffing shortages at hospitals across B.C.'s Interior have caused multiple emergency rooms to temporarily close in the past week, including in Lillooet, Merritt and Williams lake.

Merritt's emergency room reopened on Tuesday morning after being shut for the previous 48 hours amid B.C.'s heat wave.

Merritt Mayor Mike Goetz was told the emergency room was closing again this Friday — right when thousands of out-of-towners are arriving for a music festival.

Goetz pushed back, and has been told the closure is staved off. Still, he says the issue is hurting more than health care.

“This is where hospital closures start to affect your community – your investment community – people who want to move to your community,” Goetz said Tuesday.

In Williams Lake the ER was closed for four days through this past weekend.

Patients were turned away this fall as well. The province says staffing issues have been especially bad recently, with 20,000 health-care workers sick per week, compared to 9,000 thousand pre-pandemic.

But Premier David Eby admits health care in rural areas is vulnerable to start.

“The impact of the shortage of health-care professionals that were seeing in Canada is particularly acute for those people who live in those communities – who have just as much right to that quality of care as any other British Columbian,” said Eby Tuesday.

Lorne Doerkson, the Conservative MLA in the region is exasperated — noting this latest closure just when crowds arrived in town for summer events amid high temperatures.

"It's frustrating. It’s maddening. Our residents are very concerned about this," he said, noting the long travel distances in rural areas make sudden closures treacherous for patients expecting to arrive at an open ER, only to learn they need to drive to another town. "Pretty vast distances across the Cariboo Chilcotin."

Goetz is so fed up that he's submitted a receipt to the province for $84,000 and wants a credit for that next year, citing 19 ER interruptions last year.

"Had I taken money from somebody and not cut their lawn I would have been taken there by my ear and told – finish your job," he said. "We shouldn't be paying for nothing — these are taxpayers dollars."