The Board Chair for the Thompson Regional Hospital District says its welcomed news that Interior Health is set to start working on a business plan for a Cancer Care Centre in Kamloops.
Mike O’Reilly says this is a major first step to having the Kamloops Cancer Care Centre get off the ground.
“I think this is this is a very big step forward, but it’s not the last step.”
O’Reilly says the long term vision should be completed before the end of the year. After that, he says they will have to lobby as government officials to get provincial funding to carry out the project itself.
“You can’t do that without having a business plan in place, so this certainly is a big piece of that,” he said.
“We really will have a document that we can say, ‘hey, this is what we got, this is what we need, and we need provincial approval for that.'”
While no location has been determined for a site the Cancer Care Centre to go, O’Reilly says he is hoping to see those finer details surface once the plan is complete.
“When you look at a business plan that’s being created, ultimately, there’s really not an idea or plan for how big this facility is going to be, what’s going to be needed on it. So it’s hard to cite a location when you don’t have those specifics in place,” he said.
“I’m hoping ultimately that there will be a site located at that business plan and if not one, at least two or three, that will be under consideration.”‘
The total budget for the Cancer Services business plan, comes at a price tag of $600,000, with IH saying the regional districts share would be $240,000.
“It’s a big financial financial commitment. So I’m not just saying and words, we are going to do this. We were very happy to see this come across the table,” added O’Reilly.
Also as part of the cancer care business plan, IH plans look at parking, something O’Reilly says is an ask from people across the region.
“When they use Kamloops as a tertiary hospital, and they have to drive [they want to] have somewhere to park.”
“When that was mentioned [Friday] that really got me excited in the sense that we are committed to financing our portion of any form of a parkade at Royal Inland Hospital, and we did that years ago.”
O’Reilly goes on to say he believes the parkade must be done ‘part and parcel’ with the Cancer Care Centre.
“Frankly that is how our hospital system was designed, it’s based on a hub and spoke model. When we’re the hub, and everybody’s driving here, down from the spokes, they need to have somewhere to park and we’ve identified that very serious pressure at Royal Inland so I was very happy to hear that at Royal Inland.”
