A Kamloops City Councillor says he doesn’t plan to support any future capital requests made by Interior Health for the foreseeable future.
Mike O’Reilly says he hopes it will lead to some answers from the health authority, noting the issues raised by Mayor Ken Christian and Councillor Dale Bass this week are not new.
“We have been delivering on every capital ask that they’ve made. We have voted on and we have said ‘yes, we support this,'” O’Reilly said.
“I will not be supporting it at this point until it becomes a two way street because right now it is a one-way street. We provide funding and that is it. That is not the way that this should operate, and that is really the only pressure point that we have to put on IHA, is to hold back on the request for capital funding.”
Speaking on the NL Morning News, O’Reilly said city council often doesn’t know what Interior Health plans to do, as they’re not as accessible as he’d like them to be.
“Obviously we know their communications department is operating because they put cute little tweets about saving some geese, which is fantastic, but they try and deflect and change the story, but that issue is there,” he said.
“The relationship that we have with IHA is a two way street but right now its a one way street.”
Citing reports of low staffing levels and stories from nurses under stress, Dale Bass told her colleagues that more needs to be done to help healthcare workers at the Kamloops hospital.
“Nurses cried last week in this room. They just cried. Nurses are going home exhausted. More than half of them are on antidepressants right now. Some of them have suicidal thoughts,” Bass said during Tuesday’s council meeting.
Mayor Ken Christian too spoke about the issues at Royal Inland Hospital noting he was “taken aback by the candor” of the nurses after meeting with nurses last week.
“We are literally six weeks away from opening an almost half a billion dollar hospital that will be nothing more than bricks and mortar if we don’t have the staff, including other allied health professionals, to operate it,” Christian said.
O’Reilly notes he raised those very concerns about staffing six months ago.
“My statement was, ‘you know we’re going to have a $500-million facility that is going be sitting empty’, and here we are six months later and nothing has changed. It has actually gotten worse,” he said.
“That hospital is majority funded by the taxpayers of Kamloops. That is our facility and there are huge concerns. What IHA plans to do, we don’t know any more than you guys do because they don’t speak to us.”