Carberry ER closing 14 days in June

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This article was published 07/06/2024 (670 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The emergency department at the Carberry Health Centre will be closed for a total of 14 days in June, the second month since it reopened following an eight-month closure.

Prairie Mountain Health’s schedule for the department shows that it will be closed from June 1 to 7 and again from June 11 to 17.

The ER was previously closed from September 2023 to May 10, 2024, with the closure starting before last year’s provincial election.

In an email, a spokesperson for the health region did not comment directly on the cause of the closures, but suggested it was due to staffing issues.

“Emergency department service schedules are designed to ensure the necessary complement of health-care providers are available,” PMH’s regional lead of community and continuing care, Glenda Short, said in an email. “This can include physicians, nurses and diagnostics staff.”

Short noted that PMH is continuing its efforts to recruit health-care professionals, including “physicians who are interested in working in the community on a permanent basis, which will help to make (emergency department) scheduling more streamlined.”

She added that the health region has scheduled a meeting with municipal officials in Carberry in the next couple of weeks and that two nurse practitioners provide primary care services at the Carberry Medical Clinic four times a week.

Last month, Premier Wab Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara travelled to Carberry to announce that three physicians had been hired through the work of the community’s health action committee to staff the emergency room on a rotating basis.

Reached by phone on Thursday, Carberry Mayor Ray Muirhead said the community was trying to fill in the gaps, but the task is ultimately up to Prairie Mountain Health.

“There’s been a whole lot of back and forth,” Muirhead said. “This whole getting the ER open thing was a lot of phone calls to a lot of different people, and there was a lot of overlap trying to get doctors here, scheduling the whole bit. I think Prairie Mountain Health took over the scheduling.”

He said his residents are “more than appreciative” that the ER is open and they have had nothing but positive feedback about the reopening.

“But it’s one thing to make the announcement and another thing to just keep this momentum going,” Muirhead said.

He said two physicians, Dr. Zaheed Fashola and Dr. Klevis IIriani, have already started working at the health centre, but they have their own practices as well and there’s a need to recruit full-time physicians.

He said Carberry’s meeting with PMH is next week and that the town has also requested a meeting with Kinew and Asagwara.

Press secretaries for the provincial cabinet did not respond to the Sun’s requests for comment on Thursday.

After the reopening, Progressive Conservative health critic Kathleen Cook took the NDP to task after the ER was scheduled to close for the last five days of May.

“It’s not clear if these will be rotating, ongoing closures or if this is a one-time event — if the people of Carberry should expect more of this going forward,” the Winnipeg Free Press reported Cook saying during question period.

In a Thursday phone interview, Cook said she was surprised that the Carberry ER is going to be closed for almost half of this month, “because that’s not what the NDP promised.”

“They actually campaigned on Carberry specifically during the election and then they held a press conference out there,” Cook said. “Nowhere did they mention that they were expecting it to be closed for such a significant amount of time.”

She said she thinks the government owes Carberry transparency as people who rely on the ER now have to check whether it is open before they go in, though she’s sure residents are happy for every day that it is open.

“I know that the community worked really hard to get this ER back up and running and this is not on them,” she said. “This is on the provincial government.”

» cslark@brandonsun.com, with files from Michele McDougall

» X: @ColinSlark