Nicola Valley Hospital (image credit - CFJC Today)

By Michael Reeve

MERRITT ER CLOSED

‘Centralization has been an absolute disaster’; Merritt ER shut down for third time in a month

Jan 16, 2023 | 4:23 PM

MERRITT, B.C. — The emergency department at the Nicola Valley Hospital is closed Monday (Jan. 16) due to limited nursing availability. Interior Health stated that the ER should reopen at 8:00 a.m. Tuesday.

It’s the third time in a month that the hospital has been forced to close, leaving patients to travel the Coquihalla to Kamloops and Royal Inland Hospital for medical care.

The hospital in Merritt also serves as the walk-in clinic for many residents who don’t have a family doctor.

Merritt Mayor Mike Goetz confirmed that the closure is due to staff getting sick, in the midst of a increased respiratory season in British Columbia. Due to the hospital’s location between three highways, with more than 80,000 vehicles daily travelling through the area, the mayor noted that closures are unacceptable.

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“The bus crash on Christmas Eve is a clear example of why our hospital needs to be a real hospital and not a walk-in clinic,” said Goetz. “We needed our hospital to be active that night, it was active, but we weren’t able to take the seriously injured. They had to be transferred to Kelowna, Penticton and Vernon, and I think that some of them were taken to Kamloops as well. We ended up with the walking wounded who ended up being discharged fairly quickly. That is a situation we have to have a close look at and bring to the minister’s attention.”

Goetz suggested Merritt along with other smaller communities in the Interior that have faced challenges, like Ashcroft and Clearwater, need to band together in a unified voice toward the provincial government demanding change.

“This was a full-blown hospital when I moved here in 1977. We had two surgeons, we had seven or eight doctors, it was fully staffed, you could have your surgeries here, you could have babies here. This isn’t a mythical thing that we are talking about — this has been done in the past. And centralization has been an absolute disaster,” stated Goetz.