Three new doctors will be arriving at the Lakes District Hospital and Health Centre with hopes of stopping emergency department service interruptions in Burns Lake.
Mayor Henry Wiebe met with Northern Health last month, and it was decided that three additional doctors were required to make the Lakes District Hospital and Health Centre’s emergency department fully functional and provide 24/7 service.
Eryn Collins, Northern Health regional director of public affairs and media relations, confirms that new physicians will be arriving in Burns Lake. “One doctor will arrive this fall, and the other two will be arriving in the 2025 spring,” Collins said.
According to Collins, the hospital now has seven physicians who practice full or part-time in the community.
She said that Northern Health and its local leadership partners had been working continuously to recruit physicians, including medical professionals and physicians, to Burns Lake to ensure the continuity of services.
“It is important to note that there have not been any emergency department service interruptions at Lakes District Hospital due to physician coverage challenges since November of last year. And, we continue to do everything possible to prevent closures due to other staffing challenges, such as nursing coverage,” Collins said.
Last fall, several emergency department closures disrupted the hospital’s emergency department services.
It also affected other emergency first responders’ operations as well. Due to frequent hospital closures, Burns Lake’s B.C. Ambulance Service had to transport patients from the community, causing an ambulance shortage. This also strained the Burns Lake Fire Department’s budget for attending local emergency medical calls.
On October 2023, the fire department attended 22 emergency calls, and nine were only for medical assistance.
Rob Krause, Village of Burns Lake director of protective services, stressed that generally, within a year, there were 20 or 30 code purple [highest level emergency] medical calls, but now the fire department was also being called for code orange, basically checking patients’ vitals while an ambulance arrives from Houston or Vanderhoof.
Last year, on Nov. 28, the fire department received a medical emergency distress call from a cardiac arrest patient who was having chest pains in the parking lot of the hospital, just 10 feet from help, but the door was locked.
Jane Campbell, B.C. Emergency Health Services’ communications officer, in an email statement, previously said that there are two ambulances in Burns Lake. One is staffed 24/7 by paramedics working at the station; the second is operated by full-time staff during the day and paramedics working on-call at night. Currently, 13 paramedics work full-time, and three are in on-call/casual roles, totalling 16 paramedics in the community.