The Mayor of Ashcroft says she will be holding the NDP government to task after it promised to keep the Ashcroft Hospital Emergency Room open 24/7, if elected.

However, Barbara Roden says that is not an easy task as the issues at the hospital have been going on for several years under two different provincial governments.

“Well, we haven’t seen any details on what their plan is, so it will be interesting to hear what their proposed solution is,” she said. “I suspect that if there was an easy solution to this problem, then that solution would have been found an addressed quite sometime ago, because this is not a new challenge that we have here in Ashcroft.”

The Ashcroft Emergency Room is currently open on weekends but closed on statutory holidays. The hospital itself is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday.

“Its getting the staff here, whether its physicians, whether its nurses, whether its x-ray or lab technicians that is the issue. We need to have the staffing in order to keep an emergency department open 24/7,” Roden said. “It’s unfortunately not a problem that is going to be solved necessarily by throwing a lot of money at it by throwing a lot of money at it, even if that was a possibility.”

“I’d be interested to see what the NDP’s thoughts are about that.”

The incumbent BC Liberal MLA in the Fraser-Nicola riding which includes Ashcroft, Jackie Tegart, too noted that the NDP commitment is light on detail.

“Will it address the challenges in the lab? Will it address the root causes of why retention is so challenging? Things like part-time versus full-time. Scheduling in the building. Locum versus full-time doctors. It’s a great announcement. It’s one that people are quite pleased about but the devil is in the details,” she said, on the NL Noon Report last week.

As it stands, Tegart is set to return as the MLA as she has a 385 vote lead over the NDP’s Aaron Sumexheltza with as many as 2,509 mail-in ballots still to be counted.