The pediatric unit at Kelowna General Hospital had to shut down for weeks last year, and now an independent review has come back outlining the same issues doctors at the time had been speaking out about.

Interior Health brought in Harbour West Consulting to review why the hospital’s pediatric unit had to close down from May 26 to July 13 last year, and it said a lot of the same things that doctors spoke out about at the time.

Doctors, and the review, said there weren’t enough pediatricians on staff which made it dangerous for patients and strenuous on health-care workers.

The review acknowledged that KGH pediatricians had been asking for another full-time equivalent doctor since 2019 because there was only one on at a time to cover five services.

KGH’s Dr. Hannah Duyvewaardt posted a video in June 2025 talking about how doctors had been pushing for this because it was unsafe to spread pediatricians so thin.

“They have advocated saying this is an unsafe work environment for patients,” she said in the video. “We’re having a doctor shortage because they’re worried about putting their own moral and professional integrity at risk, as well as patients.”

The review found that seven pediatricians had resigned between 2023 and 2025 from 12 full-time equivalent pediatricians to 4.5. Several pediatricians cited sustainability concerns in their resignation letters to Interior Health.

Kelowna-Mission opposition MLA Gavin Dew was one of the local politicians criticizing Interior Health during the unit’s shutdown.

“This independent review confirms that frontline doctors and I were right to sound the alarm,” Dew said in a press release. “Interior Health has been warned for years, but concerns were not acted on quickly enough, trust with frontline healthcare workers collapsed, and children and families paid the price.”

Harbour West Consulting gave Interior Health 23 recommendations, and the health authority said it’s following through on fixing issues around recruitment and retention, planning health-care services and leading medical staff.

Interior Health said KGH now has 13 pediatricians on staff, or 11 full-time equivalents. That is an increase, but it’s still fewer than the 12 full-time equivalents there were in 2019.

Dew said the progress on recruiting staff is promising, but there’s more to do.

“That progress reflects the dedication of healthcare professionals who continued serving families through an incredibly difficult period. We should build on that progress by listening to frontline workers, acting on the review’s recommendations and measuring whether care is actually becoming more reliable,” he said.