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Surrey Memorial Hospital ER doctors pen scathing letter to Fraser Health saying conditions have worsened
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Patients waiting for days in a hallway. A lack of support during mass casualty events. Emergency room physicians quitting due to burnout.
The NDP continues to be dogged by complaints about the state of Surrey Memorial Hospital as it looks to shore up support in a region that may play a role in deciding the provincial election campaign.
On Tuesday, Premier David Eby and Health Minister Adrian Dix were bombarded by questions while at an event at the construction site of a second Surrey hospital, after a letter sent by ER staff at Surrey Memorial to Fraser Health CEO Victoria Lee was leaked.
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In the letter, staff warn that patient care at the hospital has continued to deteriorate, with only 20 per cent of patients being admitted within 10 hours and some waiting up to three days to receive treatment.
This is far below the 65 per cent target set by the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians and comes despite the province releasing a 30-point plan last summer to address the long waiting times and other challenges facing health care in Surrey.
Physicians and nurses also said there has been very little followup from Lee or the government since a meeting with health care workers in June 2023 and that they have been ignored when appealing for help during mass casualty cases.
“On multiple occasions, emergency physicians have identified situations that pushed thedepartment beyond a safe level to maintain quality care, leading them to call a Code Orangeactivation,” reads the letter. “Despite the in-house physician determining that Code Orange criteria had been met, 24 out of 25 requests were denied.”
Dix, however, focused on the improvements made by the NDP over the last year, including the hiring of 476 additional health-care workers at Surrey Memorial over the past year.
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“We’ve made very significant progress. All of that progress was based on consultation with the staff at Surrey Memorial Hospital,” Dix said.
The health minister also sidestepped a question about whether he is considering a change in leadership at Fraser Health, but did commit to another meeting with Surrey Memorial staff later this week. Fraser Health declined Postmedia’s request Tuesday to speak to Lee.
Over the past two months, Eby and Dix have visited the site of the new hospital, which is expected to be completed in 2029 and has already faced a 75 per cent increase to its budget, no less than three times as the NDP attempts to show improvements to health care in Surrey.
On Tuesday, the pair used the backdrop to promote the matching of 248,000 British Columbians to a family doctor since the Health Connect Registry was launched in July 2023 as well as plans to build rental housing for health-care workers near the new hospital.
Coinciding with the event was a new poll from Research Co. showing that the NDP and Conservatives remain in a statistical dead heat among voters, with Eby’s team only two points ahead of Conservative Leader John Rustad’s band of upstarts.
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“We have added 300,000 people to our health-care plan over the last two years in this province and a lot of those folks are located south of the Fraser,” said Eby.
While Surrey Memorial lies in the fairly safe NDP riding of Surrey City Centre, the new hospital is being built in the hotly contested riding of Surrey-Cloverdale where Conservative Surrey South MLA Elenore Sturko is trying to unseat NDP incumbent Mike Starchuk.
Sturko said it is clear to everyone in Surrey the dire straights that their health-care system is in under the current government and promised her party would reduce long-wait times in emergency rooms by tackling waiting lists for procedures such as CT scans and MRIs that are clogging hospital waiting rooms.
She also pushed back against NDP claims the Conservatives would cut health-care services, instead saying the party’s plan is to increase services by reducing the amount spent on bureaucracy.
Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke, who has been a frequent critic of the NDP, said that her residents will still struggle to get the care they need, even with the new hospital, as it will lack a maternity ward and other services that Surrey Memorial is struggling to keep up with demand for.
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She said she is frequently by people with their own experiences of long waiting times and other negative experiences and believes the situation is getting worse, not better.
“I can tell you that the residents of the City of Surrey understand the crisis at Surrey Memorial Hospital. They understand it full well. I get letters, I get calls. I get people that grab me in the grocery store and give me horror stories,” she said.
“We’ve heard stories of women giving birth on a boardroom table at Surrey Memorial. We’ve heard stories of people waiting two and three days in the emergency area. This is not sustainable.”
Fraser Health said there is no truth to the anecdote of the woman giving birth on a table, but did say it is examining the letter from ER staff in order to figure out a way to proceed with addressing their concerns. The health authority also cited efforts to build a new acute care tower, two cardiac catheterization labs and second radiology suite at Surrey Memorial.
Urbain Ip, a veteran emergency room physician who helped raise the alarm about staffing problems at Surrey Memorial in 2023, told Postmedia he quit his role at the hospital after realizing that nothing was likely to change in the near future.
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He said he is focused on teaching and his work at the Boundary Park Medical Centre and is much happier.
“I decided I could not work in this emergency room anymore, so I quit,” said Ip. “It’s impossible to improve when the leadership is not there and the short-term stuff, I predict, is not going to work.”
Claudine Storness-Bliss, a Surrey Memorial obstetrician-gynecologist and a former B.C. United candidate, said that seems to be the perspective of many at the hospital and that if several more physicians or nurses make the same decision as Ip, the hospital could experience diversions similar to those that occurred at Mission Memorial this summer.
But Dix remains convinced British Columbians will see improvements soon and that his party’s plan is better than the Conservative alternative.
“What we’ll be doing is adding doctors, adding nurses, adding health-care professionals, adding internists, adding long term care, which we are doing in Surrey as well, to address these issues and continue to move forward,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody would suggest that we are not better off by the addition of 476 net new staff to Surrey Memorial Hospital or that we should cut that back.”
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