Image Credit: Aaron Schulze/CFJC Today

By Victor Kaisar

Doctors Are Coming

Series of ER closures in Lillooet expected to end by fall 2025: Interior Health

May 20, 2025 | 8:00 AM

LILLOOET, B.C. — Interior Health expects the series of emergency room closures that have plagued the community of Lillooet this year, to begin to end by this fall.

Executive Director of Clinical Operations, Karen Cooper, said all the ER closures at the Lillooet Hospital and Health Centre this year have been due to a lack of physicians.

Speaking to CFJC Today, Cooper said one new physician that arrived in Lillooet in April is expected to begin working by July, with three others expected to arrive in September.

“With the addition of those four physicians, that does bring us to a full complement of physicians for Lillooet,” Cooper said. “We’re three months into where we’ve had a lessening of our physician pool, however we will be replenished before end of 2025.”

There have been 29 emergency room closures in Lillooet so far this year, 28 of which have come since March. The most recent closure lasted 13 hours from 7:00 p.m. Monday (May 19) to 8:00 a.m. Tuesday.

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“We recognize and empathize with the community of Lillooet and hear their concerns about the amount of service interruptions we’ve had at the Lillooet Emergency Department,” Cooper added.

“We do tap into the locum pool — physicians that live elsewhere who are willing to come and cover off some of our gaps — and we have noticed an uptick in people wanting to support Lillooet, so we’re grateful to our five remaining physicians as well as the locums.”

But Cooper also said it has been a challenge at times to find coverage for some of the vacancies in Lillooet, owing to its location about two hours away from Kamloops on Highway 99.

Cooper told CFJC Today that while Interior Health often redeploys staff from larger centres to cover vacancies in smaller communities, it’s harder at times to find people who are willing to travel to the more rural communities on short notice.

“I will say that the inability to fill the shift in Lillooet typically has been known quite in advance and so we do get the word out there, but we are still in a place, both within B.C. and Canada, of physician shortages, and so there is not always a person to bring in,” Cooper added.

Cooper said Interior Health will continue to do its best to prevent future ER closures in Lillooet until all of the new recruits are in place and ready to work. Some international graduates, she noted, take a while to get acclimatized to their surroundings, while others “are ready right away.”

“Nothing in healthcare will ever be full certainty but we do want to bring much more stability and reliability to our service in Lillooet, and I think with the addition of these four physicians, we’ll be able to achieve that target,” Cooper said.

“When they arrive, part of the assessment is to determine their readiness for coverage of the emergency department because adjusting to practicing medicine in a new country involves some onboarding that supports everyone to be successful.”

All of the new physicians were recruited to come work in Lillooet through the Practice Ready Assessment Physician program. In exchange for a clinical skills assessment so they can work in Canada, they agree to stay in a community for three-years

“It gives us time to make them feel welcome and to ensure that they’re integrated into the community that they’re working in and supporting,” Cooper said.