A trio of Conservative Central Okanagan MLAs gathered across the street from Kelowna General Hospital's (KGH) emergency department today.
Gavin Dew (Kelowna-Mission), Kristina Loewen (Kelowna Centre) and Macklin McCall (West Kelowna-Peachland) spoke to media in front of the beleaguered hospital and continued their call for healthcare reform at the highest levels.
That includes the resignation or firing of Interior Health president and CEO Susan Brown and the demand that Health Minister Josie Osborne come to Kelowna to visit KGH and speak with healthcare professionals on the ground.
“You can’t turn around an organization on the way out the door,” Dew said, referring to Brown’s upcoming retirement at year’s end.
“That’s why we’ve called for Susan Brown to step down, to get new leadership in; that’s why we’ve called for the minister of health to show up, to listen to doctors and to rebuild that confidence so we can actually get the system working.”
Along with renewed calls for Osborne to come to Kelowna, they once again specifically invited the health minister to attend the Kelowna Health Care Crisis Town Hall.
Dew, Loewen and McCall will be hosting the town hall, scheduled for 5-7 pm on Wednesday, July 2, at the Coast Capri hotel. Click here for more information and to secure a free ticket.
“It is so profoundly disappointing that the minister of health will not show up and answer questions like we’re doing here today,” Dew explained.
Only seconds later, veteran journalist Klaudia Van Emmerik informed Dew that she had just received an email from the Ministry of Health that asked her to name the doctors who want to speak with Osborne.
The alleged communication from the Ministry of Health sparked a long, scathing response from a visibly frustrated Dew.
“It is so incredibly shameful and hurtful and frankly disgusting that we now have communications people in the Ministry of Health trying to get journalists to name the names of doctors who have spoken up,” he said.
“(Osborne) should not be engaged in a witch hunt designed to identify which doctors, which nurses, which frontline workers are speaking up at the failure of her system.”
He continued: “I could not be angrier at this situation. This is absolutely ridiculous and absurd for the Ministry to be more focused on hunting down the doctors who are speaking up than on actually rebuilding confidence and trust with them.”
Dew says healthcare professionals have only started to turn to local media and their MLAs because they’ve given up on formal channels within IH to express their frustrations.
While the health authority has said conversations are taking place with local physicians who have chosen not to work at KGH, Dew claims IH never even bothered to do exit interviews with those doctors when they left to seek private work.
“There has to be a reset; there has to be a rebuild; there has to be a change of attitude that actually respects people that are working in the system, that listens to them when they flag issues and offer solutions,” he said.
“Solving this problem, stabilizing KGH, rebuilding confidence in IH starts with leadership; it starts with communication; it starts with trust and it fundamentally starts with recognizing that the people who work in our healthcare system are the main part of a solution.”
All three MLAs have spoken to NowMedia individually about the ongoing healthcare crisis, as well as released both individual and joint statements about the issue, but this was their first time addressing the situation together in person.
You can find those in depth NowMedia interviews within the following story links – Gavin Dew, Kristina Loewen, Macklin McCall.
