Photo: Nicholas Johansen

Interior Health laundry workers outside the Interior Health Authority building in Kelowna after their presentation on Tuesday.

A Hospital Employee's Union rep, accompanied by dozens of laundry workers, urged Interior Health Tuesday to scrap plans to privatize hospital laundry services in the region.

Donisa Bernardo, financial secretary for the HEU, told IH board members that current laundry services employ 150 workers in 11 communities, which would all be at risk if services were privatized and centralized.

“The qualified bidders for the laundry business are based out of Alberta or the Lower Mainland,” Bernardo said. “Those jobs could be shipped out of the region along with the laundry.”

IH has told the union that to continue using its services, it will need to invest $10 million over the next decade to upgrade equipment.

“We're struggling at this point in time to find resources to replace medical equipment,” said Alan Davies, regional director of support services for Interior Health. “So, sometime in the future, the decision will have to be made, can we afford medical equipment versus laundry equipment?”

Bernardo said this investment is worth it.

“If you take that over 10 years, a million dollars, it's a modest investment in order to keep a service thats run efficiently, and to keep jobs in and around Kelowna,” she said.

Private companies have until this Friday to put forth bids to the health authority.

“We'll see what the market has in store for how they suggest they can provide services to us and what the cost of that would be,” Davies said.

Before the bids are in and reviewed, it's unknown how much money, if any, would be saved by privatization.

Final decisions will be made by the end of summer, according to Davies.

In the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health privatized laundry services in 2004.

“The stories that we hear (from the Coast) are that the hospitals run out of linens or mops or whatever else they may need, and they're given a quota,” said Bernardo. “When they're short of things, they go to disposable, which from an environmental standpoint, that's not very good.”

The laundry workers recently delivered a petition to the legislature to keep services in-house. It was signed by more than 12,000 people.

While Bernardo said IH has the final decision on privatization, she believes there is pressure from higher up.

“(IH) has admitted that this is an efficiently, well-run service," she said. "So I'm making the assumption that there's people in Victoria who are asking for this.”

While Davies agreed the current system is well-run, he said the real issue is the looming capital equipment costs.