New Interior Health CEO says she’s on a mission to ‘rebuild trust’

People and municipal governments in the Interior Health region have been losing trust with the health authority but its new CEO is promising to confront the problem head-on.

Sylvia Weir said in an interview with iNFOnew.ca the health authority needs a “cultural reset.”

“I think perhaps we have put our heads down… and just tried to keep on keeping on,” she said. “We haven’t communicated as well as we could and we haven’t leveraged community force.”

Within her first month officially on the job, Weir has seen doctors resign from positions in Kamloops and Vernon, coming just months after the uproar over the temporary closure of the pediatrics department at Kelowna General Hospital.

Weir’s predecessor, Susan Brown, faced increasing pressure to step down before her resignation in June. It didn’t take long for Weir to face the same pressure as BC Conservatives honed in on the departure of psychiatrists at Vernon Jubilee Hospital.

This week, Weir has met with members of the Thompson Regional Hospital District, MLAs, mayors and members of chambers of commerce in an effort to “rebuild trust” throughout the health region.

With promises to be more transparent, along with new upcoming projects to improve access to healthcare, Kamloops officials said commitments from Interior Health appear to be more than just lip service now.

That includes ongoing doctor recruitment and a pilot project to bring virtual emergency room care to smaller, staffing-challenged rural hospitals.

“I’ve been on the hospital board for seven years and the previous CEO for Interior Health, I believe, only ever came to the board once,” Thompson Regional Hospital Board chair and Kamloops city councillor Mike O’Reilly said. “The fact (Weir) made a point of coming to Kamloops early and meeting with our board and some people throughout the community – I believe she spent a couple of days here – to me, that represents a significant shift from the way Interior Health was run previously.”

Kamloops city councillor Katie Neustaeter, who recently took part in a demonstration calling for improvements to maternity care in Kamloops, said leadership changes at Interior Health have her hopeful that “major gaps” in healthcare will be closing.

When Royal Inland Hospital’s seven obstetrician-gynecologists resigned, they complained of overbearing workloads and an inability to safely balance overlapping emergency operations with routine patient care.

Weir said even if those seven doctors returned, the health authority would still be hiring more doctors to level out the workload, leaving the maternity specialists to determine their own schedule.

As for emergency care, an upcoming pilot project would see rural hospitals staffed with nurses overnight and supported by an on-call doctor. A physician familiar with rural healthcare would be available for in-person treatment when needed, but not required at all times.

“The majority of visits in rural communities are not life and limb, they are not urgent cases,” Weir said. 

A version of the virtual emergency room care is already done in Williams Lake. Which hospitals will be included in the pilot project isn’t clear, but it could be expanded to other rural emergency departments if it’s successful.

Weir said the health authority is still hiring to reduce its need for temporary staff, like locum doctors, while nursing, which was increasingly bolstered by travel nursing agencies since 2020, has seen substantial hiring success.

“The proof is in the pudding, but the commitment is actually there,” she said.

“My primary goal as the leader of the health authority is to provide patient care, to continually improve it and to work on access.”