Health care workers are calling on the government to address hospital overcrowding across B.C., including in the brand-new emergency department at Surrey Memorial Hospital.
The B.C. Nurses’ Union claims hospitals in the province are operating at 30 per cent over capacity, a problem Surrey’s $500 million emergency department was designed to address.
The department is five times larger than the old one, but a photo obtained by CTV News reveals patients already spilling into the hallways.
“Every unit has overcapacity beds as well as hallway patients,” nurse Gail Conlin said.
Surrey Memorial staff have been forced to open up the old emergency department to accommodate another 20 patients, Conlin added.
The Fraser Health Authority said Surrey’s new emergency department has drawn a large number of people from across the region since it opened, and that hospitals generally see influxes of patients in fall and winter.
“We often see more congestion at this time of year,” said Dr. Anne Clark, Fraser Health program medical director. “For whatever reason, emergency visits certainly do rise.”
The union said it doesn’t’ accept that explanation, and called for additional staffing to relieve the pressure being felt at hospitals across the region.
“There was a man who had his last rites read to him by a priest in the hallway of Abbotsford emergency in front of 12 strangers,” union president Debra McPherson said.
Fraser Health said it has added 1,000 nurses and invested $10 million in specialty nursing education over the past three years.
About 472,000 people currently call Surrey home, but the city predicts that number will jump by more than 300,000 over the next 30 years, and by 2046 one quarter of all Metro Vancouver residents are expected to live there.
With a report from CTV British Columbia’s Maria Weisgarber and files from The Canadian Press
