Doctor shortage closes Red Lake, Ont., ER for 24 hours. Officials say it could happen elsewhere

For what's believed to be the first time in at least 30 years, a hospital in northwestern Ontario has had to close its emergency room due to a lack of available physicians. 

The Margaret Cochenour Memorial Hospital in Red Lake closed its ER for 24 hours from 8 a.m. March 26 to 8 a.m. on Sunday after exhausting all possible options for staffing the facility, said Sue LeBeau, president and chief executive officer.

During that time, two people had to be taken by ambulance to the Dryden Regional Health Centre, 216 kilometres away. 

Dr. Akila Whiley, the chief of staff in Red Lake, said the hospital had been relying on Band-Aid solutions to deal with shortages of available staff and had anticipated a closure as early as last November.

"I think we've just — we finally reached a breaking point as a group," said Whiley, who spoke to CBC News on Sunday after arriving home from vacation. 

"I feel emotional talking about it," she said, her voice trembling. "I had to take a step back because I would have gotten on a plane and come back. But it's just — I can't do it anymore. ... These people deserve so much better. And we all want to be able to do better, but we only have so much we can give before you're just exhausted."

The town, over 270 kilometres north of Kenora, is allotted seven full-time equivalent physician positions under the current provincial funding system, Whiley said. 

It's currently operating with about 5.75, not all of whom work in emergency. 

Physician shortages are a long-standing problem in northwestern Ontario. But doctors and hospital officials say the pandemic has made the situation dire, due in part to increased competition for locums and to big-city physicians giving up their secondary practices in small towns. 

What happened in Red Lake will likely happen at every small hospital in the region within the next six months, said Sara Van Der Loo, chief of staff at Atikokan General Hospital and chair of the Northwest Regional Chief of Staff Council.

"There have been quite a number of near-misses in the last few months where we've had some very near-closures," Van Der Loo said.

"We've all just barely averted closures in Sioux Lookout, in Dryden, in Kenora, in Atikokan, in Red Lake, in Geraldton."

The chair of the Fort Frances and District Physician Recruitment and Retention Committee wrote a letter to Kenora MPP Greg Rickford and Thunder Bay-Rainy River MP Marcus Powlowski on Jan. 18, calling the state of physician recruitment and retention in the region a crisis. 

"Physicians are burnt out, resignation letters have been submitted, and unfortunately, others are being written," Dr. Marc Ruppenstein wrote.