Rural N.S. residents want solutions to frequent temporary emergency room closures

Seventy-eight-year-old Albert Johnson has lived in Middleton, N.S., for more than 50 years, and has always relied on medical care at the Soldiers Memorial Hospital just a five-minute drive from his home.

“For years, we had a normal ER. We’d go there for all kinds of emergencies,” he said. “But in the past few years, we’ve had a tremendous problem.”

That problem: frequent temporary closures of the hospital's emergency department (ED).

After reopening Wednesday following a four-day shutdown, the Nova Scotia Health (NSHA) temporary closure website now states the ED is closing at 1:30 p.m. every day until further notice.

It's a big concern for Johnson, who has COPD and a heart condition.

“I don't know if I’d survive a 30-minute, 35-minute drive to Kentville. And they're very, very busy in Kentville,” said Johnson.

Area Residents have now banded together, creating a Facebook group and are organizing a rally Monday at 10 a.m. to call attention to the issue.

“We're stressed out, people are afraid,” said Carman Kerr, the Liberal MLA for Annapolis.

Kerr has been going door-to-door, gathering signatures for a petition he plans to present at the spring sitting of the legislature, calling on the provincial government to come up with a plan to keep the ED open.

He says he has 1,000 signatures so far.

“Right now, there seems to be documents floating around on different issues in health care, but there isn't a specific strategic plan on results here in Annapolis,” said Kerr.

“If Middleton is reduced hours, where do we go next? There’s an anxiety there if Annapolis is closed, and Middleton is suffering from [limited] hours and closures, what do we do next?"

“And when you have an emergent situation, and you know it will take an hour and a half for you to reach a centre, that causes a high level of anxiety and stress."

It's not the only rural area struggling with ED closures.

In Sheet Harbour, N.S., the emergency department at Eastern Shore Memorial Hospital has been shut down all this month. Residents there are also trying to get answers.

Friday, there were 10 hospital emergency departments temporarily closed in the province -- out of 38 in total -- and some aren’t scheduled to reopen until Monday.

“It's a big deal, it's interconnected with all kinds of different systems,” said Karen Foster, the Canada Research Chair on Sustainable Rural Futures for Atlantic Canada at Dalhousie University.

Foster says ED closures are not only a health risk to residents, but they can pose a threat to a rural community’s future.

“You're probably not going to move somewhere where there's no hospital or no emergency room, it definitely does hurt communities,” said Foster.

“If a new business is going to move in and employ a lot of people, business owners want to know there’s emergency facilities nearby, especially if they’re doing any kind of dangerous work, and a lot of the most dangerous occupations are concentrated in the most rural communities,” she said.

“There’s been research done that talks about how it makes people feel when their community loses [an] institution, and it makes people feel like their community is dying,” she adds.

The province’s recent announcement on measures to ease the strain on Nova Scotia’s emergency departments did not directly address the subject of rural ED closures.

Friday, health minister Michelle Thompson said the province is working on providing alternative places for care, such as urgent treatment centres (UTCs) or collaborative emergency centres (CECs).

She also said the recruitment of emergency physicians is a priority for health-care facilities throughout the province.

“So ongoing, we continue to look at the assets of communities and the needs of communities,” she said.