Organizers estimated about 200 people from Merritt and the surrounding area attended a Saturday afternoon rally protesting repeated emergency room closures at the local hospital.
The rally was held at Merritt’s Central Park, just down the street from the Nicola Valley Hospital. Signs held by dozens of rally participants lining the street drew supportive honks from vehicles passing by.
“People are frustrated, they’re angry, they’re nervous, they’re upset,” said Georgia Clement, one of the rally organizers.
“If you have an emergency here, and our emergency room is closed — and just think about the fact that that highway between Kamloops and Merritt gets closed periodically as well — I mean, those two factors combined could mean death for people. Literally death. So IHA [Interior Health Authority] needs to stop the closures.”
Merritt Mayor Mike Goetz, who was at the rally, has estimated the emergency department has been closed due to staffing shortages about a dozen times in the past four months.
When the ER is closed, residents must go to Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops to receive care — about an hour's drive away.
Percy Joe, a former Shackan Indian Band chief who attended Saturday’s rally, said it’s important to have hospital services running in Merritt.
“Particularly since there’s the Coquihalla Highway where a lot of accidents happen," he said. "To save lives, you take them to the shortest place there is, and that’s Merritt. And of course, the local citizens need it here."
Goetz agreed, noting healthcare centralization isn’t working for Merritt and other smaller communities.
“This isn't a game we're playing here — people's lives are at stake,” he said.
The mayor said he’s in weekly contact with the IH and has been in touch with the Health Minister Adrian Dix. He said IH has been doing some work to address issues at the hospital.
“There was some shift problems that they got fixed, and I do believe they put out a posting for an RN [registered nurse]," he said. "So I do see progress there. The doctor situation is going to take more work."
Goetz said the Nicola Valley Hospital used to be fully functioning, but its status has changed over the decades.
“My nieces and nephews were born here," he said.
"The thing that gets me is we can't even have a baby here — so 20 years from now, there won't be a single person born from Merritt, because they all go to Kamloops. So that’s a concern."
Kathy Doull, executive director for clinical operations for rural acute and community for IH west, said the health authority has met with hospital staff to understand more about the site’s needs.
“We are absolutely committed to making improvements and working through recruitment and retention challenges,” she said.
According to Doull, IH has posted three additional RN jobs for the Merritt emergency room, along with other support positions.
Doull said IH is using a similar strategy to what was used in Clearwater. After experiencing nearly 60 closures over six months in 2022, Clearwater’s hospital hasn’t seen any service disruptionssince September.
“It is both that short-term strategy of how do you fill in any holes or vacancies, and then the longer-term strategy about how to support the recruitment and retention long-term,” Doull said.
“That is part of the work we've been doing is meeting with the staff, and then really trying to look at what positions are necessary to ensure that we stabilize the services at the site.”
Clement said residents not only want to see closures ended, but improvements made to modernize and upgrade the Merritt hospital.
She said challenges around nursing and doctor shortages aren’t caused by people, but by “politicians and bureaucrats.”
“So the politicians and the bureaucrats need to fix this problem — and we need to get it done now. We can't wait any longer,” she said.
“We don't want any more closures. And if we get another closure, we will be ramping up our resistance to it, and our protesting — and I mean ramping it up.”
