Crisis at Surrey Memorial Hospital: nurses
Posted June 18, 2014 10:16 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
SURREY (NEWS1130) – Surrey Memorial Hospital’s expanded ER opened less than a year ago but nurses there say it’s in the throes of a crisis.
One veteran nurse who works at the hospital says the problems are apparent but there is no clear solution to the overcrowding.
A new critical care tower opened this week but Gail Conlin says that hasn’t eased the backlog.
“They have patients that are going into an admit hold area that should be on a monitored bed. You’re having patients in a waiting room that end up deteriorating to the point that a code (blue) is called. It becomes a crisis point.”
She says it’s as bad as it has ever been, with too many patients needing to be admitted, using up emergency department beds.
“It’s crazy, it’s absolutely crazy. It’s so unsafe.”
Conlin says there is no one solution.
“It’s a beautiful critical care tower. But what they’ve done is they’ve moved ICU over, the renal unit over, neonatal intensive care over. They’ve opened a neurology unit. So they still have patients to bring over. But unless you need any one of those critical care units, the people aren’t going there, the patients aren’t going there. The majority of the patients are going to the medical units.”
And she says there is a shortage of those medical units and admitting beds meaning patients build up in the emergency department.
“One of the doctors said to me, and I quote, ‘this is the worst that I’ve ever seen it.'”
Last fall, the health minister promised a review of Fraser Health, after nurses sounded the alarm about overcrowding problems in many of the region’s ERs.
Conlin says they’re still waiting on that review.
News1130 has a call in to Fraser Health for comment.
