(image credit - CFJC Today)

By Michael Reeve

HEALTH CARE CHALLENGES

In the face of TRFO challenges, hospital district chair says focus must shift from Interior Health to Kamloops

Sep 12, 2025 | 4:54 PM

KAMLOOPS — Interior Health is still working through its plans after Thompson Regional Family Obstetrics (TRFO) announced it would no longer be accepting referrals.

Interior Health is advising pregnant mothers to contact their primary healthcare providers or an organization like First Steps. But with 40,000 Kamloops residents without a doctor and First Steps only able to provide care to 30 weeks, gaps remain. And they’re gaps that IH is still working to find solutions to.

“What is a tertiary hospital and what are the services we should be providing? Really, that is something we need to focus on — making sure our hospital has all the services it should have,” said Mike O’Reilly.

O’Reilly chairs the Thompson Regional Hospital District and noted it’s time for the board to start looking after themselves instead of relying on Interior Health.

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“At our last hospital board meeting, we made some of those changes in our bylaws that actually allow money to be spent on doctor recruitment,” said O’Reilly. “That is going down to the United States and trying to attract specialists that we know we need in Thompson Regional Hospital District — not necessarily what Interior Health needs for IH, but what we need for Kamloops.”

With Interior Health still searching for a solution, Kamloops Centre MLA Peter Milobar is calling on the minister to step up and deliver.

“The time is long since past that we allow the health minister to simply defer and shrug things off to the health authority,” said Milobar. “We need to know that there is a provincial plan in place, provincial direction from the health minister and the premier’s office to Interior Health on how to properly deal with maternity services in Kamloops to stabilize them. This should not be a several year game of whack-a-mole.”

TRFO will be working with their current patients up until six weeks post birth. That leaves Interior Health and the ministry with just six months to find a path forward.

“To have proper prenatal access is incredibly important,” said Milobar. “That is when women find out, sometimes, that they have high blood pressure they otherwise would not have had, or pre-diabetes, or all sorts of things going on with the baby, and you find that out with regular prenatal checkups. If those become almost impossible to access easily, that is a big worry.”

Recruitment was the major issue listed by TRFO, needing a mass influx of doctors into the region to remain operational.

“We do need to chart our own path forward, and not just for what the politicians want or think we need. This is coming from the doctors, the residents, the people in the profession telling us what they need and we are not getting it,” said O’Reilly.

CFJC News reached out to Health Minister Josie Osborne for comment on our story, but she was not made available ahead of our deadline.