Doctors of BC says hospitals across province struggling, not just Surrey Memorial

The group representing physicians in B.C. says it’s not surprising emergency room doctors at Surrey Memorial Hospital (SMH) felt they had no choice but to write an open letter, detailing a “crisis” at the facility.

Dr. Gord McInnes, co-president of the Section of Emergency Medicine within Doctors of BC, says people seeing problems stemming from a lack of resources isn’t just a “big city problem,” adding other hospitals are also facing challenges.

“I can’t emphasize enough the fact that this is a pervasive problem,” he said.

“It’s Surrey, it’s Langley, it’s Ducan, it’s Naniamo — I mean, the list goes on and on. It’s smaller emergency departments that are not getting the media attention right now in the sense that, you know, many of us that work in larger centres are also staffing places like 100 Mile, Oliver, Merritt, some are providing coverage as far north as Fort Nelson.”

McInnes says it’s a problem that won’t be solved without big changes.

“A large group of emergency physicians were concerned on a number of kinds of topics, if you will, one being the lack of capacity in our healthcare system, both in beds acutely and in the community. In addition to the lack of human resources…The second point was that the hospitalist system was not robust enough to be able to deal with admitted patients,” he said.

“Their third point was more based on leadership or the fact that you know the alarm bells had been ringing on this for a while, and from the section of emergency medicine, I can definitely add my support to that.”

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He adds the lack of resources is a huge problem at many hospitals, not just SMH.

“One of the problems is when you have admitted patients that are waiting to be seen by a service. They are often now being looked after in many larger hospitals and by, it could be care aides or licensed practical nurses, who are doing the best they can. But sometimes these patients take a turn for the worse and it’s not recognized,” he said.

In that situation, McInnes says things can go sideways very quickly.

He says there are a few contributing factors affecting resource levels, including aging staff.

“One is this hospitalist crisis which, again, we could kind of see coming, but the other part is there are emergency physicians that I know that have a — I’d probably consider myself one of them — have a good five or 10 years left in us that are moving to retirement or moving to work in areas that are less stressful,” McInnes said.

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He says the challenges doctors have been facing aren’t new, and that the “crisis” detailed in the letter wasn’t a surprise.

“We have been in consultation with the government for the last 10 months, really, knowing that crisis point was coming if it had not really already arrived,” he told OMNI News.

McInnes adds, in this time, headway has been made to help address some of the challenges, such as through the training of more nurses at Simon Fraser University.

The concerns surrounding SMH were highlighted by groups after a stabbing left a teenager and a man hurt.

It was a situation that the president of the BC Nurses Union, Aman Grewal, said was “extremely concerning,” prompting renewed calls for increased safety.

With files from Charlie Carey, Hana Mae Nassar and Martin MacMahon