Northeast B.C. clocks up more than 600 hours of ER closures in 2025

FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. — Despite making significant improvements on the year before, Northern Health continued to struggle with keeping emergency rooms open in northeast B.C. in 2025. 

Between July 2024 and January 2025, Northern Health-operated medical facilities in the northeast – ERs and the Fort St. John birthing centre – closed 53 times for a total of over 800 hours. 

Then, from January 2025 to December 2025, northeast ERs closed 46 times for a total of at least 628 hours. Counting the birthing centre’s five closures this year as well, that number rises to only 681.5 hours over 51 instances. 

That’s fewer instances and for fewer hours over around double the length of time.

Arthur Williams, a communications advisor with Northern Health, told Energeticcity.ca for a recent article that emergency room closures are “always a last resort,” and the online alerts often cite short staffing as the cause.

In 2025 the Chetwynd General Hospital emergency room was the most frequently impacted, closing every month except July, totalling 24 closures throughout the year for nearly 356 hours. 

The Fort St. John Hospital ER was the least affected by staffing shortages this year, closing once on December 25th for six hours.

The Dawson Creek and District Hospital experienced 12 emergency room closures for a total of 117.5 hours and the Fort Nelson General Hospital experienced six closures for 63.5 hours over the past 12 months. 

Meanwhile, the Tumbler Ridge Health Centre closed three times, once without a web announcement, for a total of 86 hours in 2025.

June was the month with the most emergency room diversions by hours, accumulating 84.5 hours over three ER closures in Chetwynd.

In comparison, March was the month with the fewest emergency room closures by both hours and the number of instances, with one closure in Chetwynd resulting in 25 hours of emergency room diversions.

While September saw the most individual ER closures – six: four in Chetwynd, one in Dawson Creek and one in Fort Nelson.

There was not a single month in 2025 where no emergency closures occurred. The longest stretch between emergency room closures was experienced in Fort St. John, which closed on October 1st, 2024 and December 25th, 2025. 

In September, Northern Health announced the on-call hours for the Tumbler Ridge Health Centre would be slashed from overnight to just 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays. 

Following this change, the emergency department’s usual opening hours were 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. On September 5th, the first day of the new on-call hours, one person passed away overnight travelling in an ambulance en route from Tumbler Ridge to Dawson Creek.

Northern Health executives have stated it intends to find a permanent fix to healthcare for Tumbler Ridge in the future, and intends for this to be a temporary solution brought on by a lack of available healthcare staff. 

The Northern Health Virtual Clinic also suffered a 26-hour ‘outage’ starting at 10 a.m. on August 25th. An update on August 26th stated clinic staff continued to experience “difficulties accessing the clinical information database.”

The Fort St. John Hospital’s birthing centre has also felt the effects of medical diversions, experiencing five this year for a total of 53.5 hours. 

All the birthing centre diversions, including two over the week of Christmas, were due to staffing shortages, however none were announced by Northern Health online, with registered patients of the centre instead receiving text messages regarding the closures.