Survey: Emergencies
Castanet Staff – 15/09/2022 / 19:30 | History: 385423
Photo: contributed
Port McNeill Mayor Gaby Wickstrom appears on a screen at the Re-envisioning Health Care panel at the Union of BC Municipalities meeting in Whistler.
Port McNeill Mayor Gaby Wickstrom, whose North Island city has been hit by rotating weekend emergency closures, applauded fellow mayors Wednesday for passing a motion calling on the province to take urgent action to keep emergency rooms open 24 hours a day across BC.
The resolution from the Union of BC Municipalities meeting in Whistler also calls on the province to increase funding and training opportunities for health professionals to “ensure adequate and necessary levels of care.”
“All we can do is advocate, but it will help to know that the Union of BC Municipalities will be at the table,” Wickstrom said.
Municipal officials representing nearly 200 local governments are gathering at UBCM’s annual conference at the Whistler Conference Center this week. The convention closes on Friday with an address from Prime Minister John Horgan.
One of the most anticipated events of the week was a panel discussion with Health Minister Adrian Dix on Re-envisioning Health Care, but some who attended felt the vision was the same as they have heard in recent years.
Both urban and rural communities are facing healthcare pressures ranging from the closure of rotating emergency rooms to shortages of doctors, nurses and emergency dispatchers and call takers, all in the midst of two public health emergencies: the pandemic crisis and drug overdose.
Dix told the mayors that the province has added 38,000 health care workers. The Ministry of Health said on Wednesday that more surgical interventions were performed in the week of August 7-13 than in the same week in 2019 — 6,365, 356 more — and that the number of MRI examinations was 69 per cent greater in the last fiscal year than in 2016. -17.
Ambulance call volumes have increased significantly during the pandemic. In 2021-22, there were 2,232 ‘purple’ or highest priority calls for an ambulance in the Island Health region, compared to 1,793 in 2019-20.
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