Kamloops urgent care clinics divert 25 patients daily from ER

In a city without a walk-in clinic, Interior Health’s second urgent care centre is alleviating pressure on local emergency department.

Up to 25 people per day who would have gone to the hospital’s emergency room are going to one of the two urgent and primary care centres, and that number will climb as the North Shore care centre hires more doctors.

“We do know that many of the patients who access care at the urgent and primary care centres would have previously needed to seek care for urgent, but not emergency, needs at the emergency department,” Interior Health’s director of clinical operations in Kamloops, Tara Mochizuki, told iNFOnews.ca.

The North Shore clinic opened in November 2024 and since then has seen 24,800 patients, at least 10,000 fewer than the older South Shore clinic sees in a year.

They are open to anyone needing urgent care, not just those without a family physician, but unattached patients may have no other option aside from Royal Inland Hospital. Kamloops also has some of the longest wait times in the province for people to get connected with a family doctor.

Around the time the North Shore clinic opened, there were more than 26,000 people from the Kamloops area on the provincial wait list for family doctors, waiting an average of two-and-a-half years to be connected. Perhaps because of the outsized demand, the new clinic didn’t alleviate pressure on the other.

Patient visits have held steady at Interior Health’s South Shore urgent care clinic for the past three years, which has roughly 3,250 appointments per month.

It had 36,749 patient visits from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024 and 41,555 the next year. From April 1, 2025, to the end of February 2026, there were another 36,632 patient visits.

With the second clinic seeing nearly 25,000 patients since it opened in late 2024, urgent care visits have only climbed in Kamloops, rather than reducing demand for the South Shore location attached to Royal Inland Hospital.

Mochizuki expects that’ll climb even further in the future.

“Capacity will continue to increase at the North Shore (clinic), and I think the patient volumes really speak to the capacity of the urgent and primary care centre, not necessarily what the demand is from the community,” she said, adding that the North Shore location isn’t yet taking referrals from the hospital emergency department.

Urgent care clinics are intended to assist patients with health concerns and illnesses that do not need emergency care including fevers, sprains, minor cuts and urinary problems. The “team-based” approach can also connect patients with physical therapists, nurses and social workers, not just doctors, she said.

Mochizuki said that while it is fully staffed for most positions, the North Shore clinic is still hiring family physicians and nurse practitioners.