Rising concerns surround the waiting times and treatment of patients in the city
By: Anna Montaner
Local and International residents of Kamloops have been finding it harder to find medical help. As clinics close down, the ER is becoming saturated with patients simply looking for family doctors state Inland Hospital nurses.
Inuri Kahadugoda is an international graduate of Thompson Rivers University. She has lived in Kamloops for almost four years, and in that time she has not been able to receive medical care for her chronic Illness. When she was six years old, Kahadugoda was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, an inflammatory bowel disease that causes chronic inflammation of the GI tract.
While she can go months without any symptoms, when they do eventually appear it can be painful and there’s potential complications. “The first time I went to the Emergency Room, they told me there wasn’t much they could do and to just treat my symptoms at home. That was after waiting four hours without speaking to anyone,” Kahadugoda said.
The first couple of years she was in Kamloops there was a walk-in clinic near Campus where she could go, but that process wasn’t easy either. “I remember waking up very early just to stand outside and be told that the doctor would only take the first five people in line, getting treatment here has always been stressful, especially during a bad flare up,” Kahadugoda added.
Kamloops residents are growing frustrated as waiting times go up, and medical care seems harder to come by. As Kahadugoda stated, going to the ER just to be told to go home, does nothing but waste time. It keeps people from seeking help early on, which in turn, makes those people more ill.
In a press release last year, Dr. Todd Ring called for the need of a middle care facility. As people have been going to the emergency room for issues a family practitioner should look at. This adds to the waiting time for everyone, and potentially puts patient facing an emergency at risk due to not being treated on time.
In 2017, Kamloops’s walk-in clinic located in North Shore was set to close, a year later the Summit clinic also closed, due to not having enough doctors to maintain it. There are medical centers around downtown, but while they might be called walk-in, that is not the case. Every clinic now, including Urgent Care, asks its patients to call at opening to be put on a waiting list. Most people never make it out of that list.
This summer, residents where hit with another bad news. The largest maternity clinic in Kamloops closed because of staff recruitment issues. According to Daniela Humphrey, a registered nurse at Royal Inland Hospital the issue lies on not having enough people to cover all of Kamloops.
Humphrey who was a teacher for years saw the amount of people needed in the medical industry. She went back to school and during Covid began her life as a nurse. She has been working at the hospital for almost three years.
“While we make it a point to treat everyone that comes through the doors, its hard to assess who really needs the attention before we have them on a gurney.” Humphrey noticed that there’s more patients coming in with common colds and digestive problems, that a clinic would be more suited to treat.
“When I first started [2020] we started to see a lot of nurses leave because it just got too much. We were working days on end; beds were full, and nobody seemed to know when it was all going to end.” Humphrey said. According to the Canadian Nurses Union, 60 per cent of nurses said they would leave their jobs withing the next year.
The renovations to the ER haven’t helped the long waiting times. As the space gets smaller, less patients are able to go through as said by another registered nurse. “They keep extending the time for renovations, but we’re thinking maybe around three years more for everything to be complete,” Dyana Clouston said. She started working in the Kamloops hospital July 2020.
“I see how desperate patients are to receive help, even if its not an emergency knowing they’ve probably waited months to get treated. which means months in pain does make me feel like there should be more options in Kamloops.BC even because it is an issue throughout the province,” Clouston said.
The answer to this health care crisis might have to come from different providers said Clouston, who thinks that by funding smaller programs such as senior care, maternity and clinics, emergency room will have less pressure to provide for everyone.
Residents like Kahadugoda do not want band aids for these issues, they want to see real change in the system. That change will hopefully come as the city of Kamloops announced a founding agreement for the 2024-2027 term as well as a Cancer Care that will open its door next year.
