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By Katie Neustaeter and Alix Dolson

Sound Off

SOUND OFF: Pregnant? Good luck — Interior Health’s colossal failure

Oct 20, 2025 | 2:22 PM

IN OUR CURRENT HOTBED of political strife, it was difficult to imagine a unifying cause that could bring people from every corner of the political spectrum together. But where Interior Health has a lack of will, there’s a way. And they’ve done it in extraordinary fashion this time, because Canadians unite in the belief that women should have access to the safe, timely maternity care we pay to guarantee, and we will defend that right.

Navigating pregnancy and childbirth is simultaneously the most tender and terrifying experience in life. Expectant parents spend countless hours learning everything they should and shouldn’t do while pregnant, as well as the multitude of the frightful ways in which it can all go wrong.

Historically, childbirth has been among the most dangerous things we can ask of the human body, but many years of advancing the science and developing safe models of care have resulted in more predictable childbirth outcomes. While the miraculous event of birthing life is never without risk, in 21^st century Canada it is more than fair to assume our healthcare system will keep us as safe as possible. It’s why we pay our taxes, live near care centres, employ healthcare workers and get to call ourselves a developed nation.

Most of us who have experienced pregnancy complications, precarious deliveries and even loss in British Columbia can say that, even when things went very sideways, we still had the right healthcare supports in place to feel confident in our care — knowing that the safety of mother and child were paramount in our healthcare system.

Until now.

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While they continue to declare, “Nothing to see here! Everything is fine!” the reality is the actions — and inaction — of Interior Health and the provincial government over the last decade have nearly but collapsed maternity care in Kamloops. As they further humankind, expectant parents here can no longer make the reasonable assumption that the systems of care are robust enough to rely on in their home community – even if their home community has a tertiary hospital that serves more than 225,000 people in British Columbia, Canada.

What?!

And we must also collectively acknowledge the current state of maternity care in the Interior is no accident. Instead, it’s a total failure of leadership, funding and priorities that have existed across parties, authorities, individuals and time. Interior Health and the Ministry of Health have allowed services for pregnant people and their families to crumble and the inequalities at the heart of the issue are painfully obvious.

These deficits disproportionately burden women, who bear the physical risk when prenatal checks aren’t accessible, when high‐risk pregnancies don’t have adequate support or go undetected, and when the fear of complication grows because the system of care is opaque and unpredictable. When women have less power over their health care, their needs are treated as afterthoughts, particularly as women’s health is often still considered to be “niche” or “less urgent”. Misogyny is not only in words, but also in systems.

For two years, the Thompson Region Family Obstetrics (TRFO) clinic – responsible for delivering approximately 60 per cent of Kamloops’ babies – has been turning away many new patient referrals. Why? Because staffing levels are critically low, specialist care for high‐risk patients is lacking, compensation isn’t competitive and birth workers are burning out. Patient caps and threats of closure have been coming from TRFO for years, but now, as of February 2026, they will not be accepting any new referrals. Adding to the crisis is the fact that this week, all seven obstetrician-gynecologists at Royal Inland Hospital resigned their hospital privileges, warning of a “near-total loss of low- and high-risk obstetrics in Kamloops.”

Interior Health says deliveries and labour care will continue at RIH, though depending on staffing, patients may be transported elsewhere. Expectant mothers without a primary care provider — an unjustifiable sentence of its own — are being told to access what they can. Those might be family physicians, nurse practitioners or the emergency room. First Steps, or as it’s now known, the Early Pregnancy Access to Care and Triage Clinic, is a service focused on low barrier access to care in early pregnancy, with referrals out for later pregnancy. But without enough delivering providers to refer to, many people are left without primary care in their third trimesters. Some families are being forced to leave the community for their care, hoping they can find a provider in a surrounding city or town.

Interior Health is failing in its most elemental job. It has an obligation to ensure safe, continuous, high‐quality maternity care is available. Instead, it has repeatedly deferred, silenced its internal critics, made vague and unfulfilled promises, and failed to properly staff and resource these services. Some of these failures stem from a previous lack of investment, but much of the problem is that of priorities, organizational culture and will.

Ultimately, we fear without immediate intervention, the circumstances in Kamloops will lead to preventable death. We also believe healthcare workers fear this, which is why they have been so urgently sounding the alarm bells.

Maternity Matters Kamloops is calling for urgent action to protect safe, local maternity care. Our priorities reflect the concerns we’ve heard raised by physicians, maternity nurses, midwives and other birth workers, and families in our community:

1. Stabilize staffing
2. Guarantee continuous hospital services
3. Rebuild collaborative care models
4. Advance equity in access
5. Increase transparency and stability
6. Hold those responsible for this crisis accountable

​Leadership requires integrity and commitment. The provincial government and Interior Health leadership have failed in their responsibility to keep pregnant women, babies and their healthcare providers in the Kamloops region confident in their safety. Those responsible for this failure must be held accountable in meaningful ways.

When maternity care falters, we fail as a society. When Interior Health and the provincial government allow pregnant families to live in fear that they are not guaranteed care, it is a betrayal. We are demanding better for ourselves, each other and the children of the Interior – and we hope you agree. Because there should be no neutrality when the lives of mothers and babies depend on policy choices — your wives, children, sisters, friends, coworkers and partners are actively being put at risk.

Interior Health and the provincial government must be held accountable for this egregious failure and take steps to immediately resolve this crisis.

If you care about maternal and fetal health and believe that our government and health authorities have a moral, ethical and legal obligation to fix this problem of their own making, then join us in demanding change now. Email or call the Minister of Health and IH’s administrators to let them know we will not abide in this failure.

And join us on October 25^th to rally in support of maternity care in Kamloops.

For more information and to connect into this movement, visit www.maternitymatterskamloops.com.

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Submitted by Katie Neustaeter and Alix Dolson on behalf of Maternity Matters Kamloops, a grassroots collective comprised of advocates, birth workers, and parents who have organized in response to the maternity care crisis in the Kamloops Region.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.