About 150 people attended a meeting last night in Ashcroft where interior health was on hand to answer questions about health care in the community and surrounding region.
The Emergency Department in Ashcroft has faces frequent closures including some unexpected closures that occurred in the spring and summer of this year. Mayor Barbara Roden says it is leaving people worried about what happens when they have an emergency and it was important that officials come and talk to people.
“The importance of Interior Health coming to the community, because of the stress levels, because of the uncertainty, because the questions and frustrations that people have, and I can’t answer those questions, other people in town can’t answer those questions, it needed to be Interior Health coming to talk to people face to face and give them an opportunity…. Just so much uncertainty about if I have an emergent issue, is the Ashcroft hospital open, do I need to be going to Hundred Mile or Lillooet or going into Kamloops? So, in a place with a 24/7 emergency department like RIH you obviously don’t have that concern, you know that if you go there it will be open.”
Roden recalled one story where someone broke their leg Friday night and decided it would be better to just wait it out. “Heard yesterday about a person who broke their leg one Friday and they knew that emergency department was opening at 6:00, so they got someone to put some ice on it and then at 6:01 they went to the emergency department because it’s either that or you face a long trip somewhere else or you face a very long wait.”
Interior Health’s VP of Clinical Operations, Karen Bloemink, said on the NL Morning News what the plan is moving forward.
“The priority focus for us right now is sustaining the current services that exist in Ashcroft. We have had some challenges with recruitment of health professionals and this is not uncommon across British Columbia and in fact nationally.”
She says they talked about what’s on the minds of people in the region. “I think the main concern that we did hear last night was a need for the residents of Ashcroft and the surrounding area to some certainty around what they can expect from the Ashcroft Hospital and Health Care Centre and we did take that opportunity to listen to those concerns.”
Bloemink added that it spent some time discussing the services that are available in the community. “Mechanisms for us to get that information out to the community so that they can expect, in terms of hours of services being open and when there may be the event of a service interruption, how we communicate that to the public in a way that is readily available for them.” She stresses that Interior Health does not anticipate service interruptions in the near future.