BC Conservatives criticize health minister over OB/GYN walk off

The backlash from the entire OB/GYN department at a Kamloops hospital quitting and more than 100 physicians writing a public letter in their colleagues’ support keeps following the B.C. health minister around.

During Question Period in the province’s legislature, multiple MLAs of the BC Conservatives caucus questioned Health Minister Josie Osborne over the implications for patients.

North Island MLA Anna Kindy, the shadow cabinet’s health critic, tells 1130 NewsRadio that a lack of meaningful response from the health authority and the government is to blame for the fact that it has even come so far.

“This is not some impulse that they are going to resign; they were trying to solve this,” Kindy said in an interview.

“But what they were finding was that their situation was really untenable and very unsafe for patients. And they weren’t listened to. And they said, ‘You know what, we’re not being listened to. We’ve had enough of this. We can’t work through the conditions where we are not safe to practice.’”

She joins the OB/GYN across the province who signed the letter calling on the government to work on sustainable solutions to overworked physicians.

Kindy is specifically criticizing that when workers are burnt out, the health care system only provides short-term solutions.

She is calling for more support for doctors and safer work environments.

“Everybody is working under an at-capacity or over-capacity situation, almost. And so, where will those patients go, right? So, they’re saying that we need to support these docs,” Kindy said.

“You need to look at what’s happening to OB/GYN around the province and look at solutions by inputting what we are saying as frontline workers.”

Osborne pushes for dialogue between Interior Health and physicians

She says something has to change.

“First, we are seeing the pediatric department in Kelowna having issues, and then the OB/GYN in Kamloops, and now the psychiatry in Vernon; all four psychiatrists in the psychiatric department in Vernon are resigning. They are in patient care, which I’ve never seen.”

Meantime, in B.C.’s Legislative Assembly, Health Minister Osborne says she expects Interior Health and the physicians to come together to talk through these issues.

“Undertake the negotiations that are underway right now, holding the patient at the centre of the work they do,” Osborne said.

“I am confident that if they do that, they can come together. And Mr. Speaker, my commitment to them, to Interior Health, is to listen to them.”

With files from Raynaldo Suarez.