Royal Inland Hospital (image credit - File Photo)

By Michael Reeve

CARDIAC CARE

Interior Health working toward reopening the ICCHA-Wish Coronary Care Unit at RIH

Aug 13, 2025 | 4:29 PM

KAMLOOPS — As CFJC Today reported Tuesday, the ICCHA-Wish Fund is calling on the NDP government and Interior Health for action on three priorities around cardiac care at Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops.

“Our district is almost 250,000 people within the TNRD,” said ICCHA-Wish Founder Al Patel. “And to deprive that critical care, where every second counts for our patients — it’s outrageous. This government is failing big time.”

The cardiac care unit at RIH was closed in the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, when hospitals were faced with staffing crunches, leading to nurses being reassigned to other areas of need. The unit has yet to be re-established.

“A lot of staff were redeployed to areas to deal with urgent vacancies at the time,” said Jaymi Chernoff, Chief Operating Officer for Clinical Operations, IH South. “And then through attrition we have definitely seen a turnover in staff, but there is definitely an ongoing commitment to continue to plan to re-open that CCU as it currently stand as well as continue to explore opportunities to expand.”

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The timelines outlined in the requests from ICCHA-Wish will be hard to meet according to Interior Health, but they are working towards a similar goal, noting they need to walk again before they run.

“Before we can look at bringing in something like an interventional cath lab we do have to look at some of the foundational services, like ensuring we have a fully functional cardiac care unit,” said Chernoff. “And so getting the cardiac care unit at this site fully operational in whatever capacity that means should certainly be a possibility, while we continue to plan for what a cardiac cath lab in this community will look like.”

While the cardiac care unit isn’t fully operational, the hospital still sits as a tertiary cardiac referral centre.

“All the services you would expect to receive by medical cardiologists is what you can receive here,” said Chernoff. “There is only one intervention location currently in Interior Health as well as cardiac surgery and that is at Kelowna General Hospital. Patients here they can receive diagnostics, medical stabilization and then if they need interventions or anything invasive, they would go to Kelowna or the Lower Mainland, if needed.”

Interior Health, after hearing from staff on the ground in Kamloops, are looking at possible location changes for the cardiac care unit to better align it the intensive care unit.

“(BC Health Minister) Josie Osborne, she has to come back and answer these questions in the media, and ask her the same questions — why are they depleting our services? It’s a systemic depletion of interventional service at Royal Inland Hospital. This is not right,” said Patel.