Kristina Winter tried to take her son to the pediatric emergency at Surrey Memorial Hospital on Tuesday evening (Nov. 22).
When they arrived, they saw the line to check in was out the door. Winter asked someone in the line,
“Is this the lineup to go in?” she asked someone in line. “And she’s like, ‘Yeah, we haven’t checked in yet.’ So then we left.”
Winter, who lives in North Delta, initially drove to Surrey for care because some of her friends recommended the pediatric emergency room.
After seeing the line and leaving, she took her son to Delta Hospital in Ladner instead. He was checked in right away and, in just under four hours, was seen by a doctor.
Winter had no complaints about the care her son received there.
While CTV has reported that Surrey’s pediatric ER is seeing four times the number of patients it can handle, stories of jam-packed emergency rooms are not unique to Surrey.
In a statement to Black Press Media, Dr. Craig Murray, regional medical director of emergency medicine for Fraser Health, said hospitals in the region are experiencing a “higher-than-normal volumes of patients, including children, in our Emergency Departments.”
B.C. Children’s Hospital in Vancouver is also experiencing an influx of patients. They are triaging less serious patients from its emergency department to a nearby area due to a surge of people with respiratory illnesses.
Surrey’s pediatric emergency room was built to accommodate 20 000 patients annually. In the year before the pandemic hit 2019, the ER saw over 44,000 children.
COLUMN: Fast-growing Surrey must receive its fair share of health resources
Jane Adams, CEO of Surrey Hospital Foundation, said the pediatric ER is only 5,500 square feet.
“A lot of people have homes larger than that,” she said.
Adams said that health care has “not been keeping pace in terms of the specialized services we need for children.”
The 2021 census from Stats Canada showed that Surrey is the fastest-growing city in Western Canada and 23 per cent of its population are children and youth. Surrey also has the highest birth rate in the province.
Adams added that some health care available for children and youth in Surrey “have contracted over the last two decades.”
In 2001, the hospital had 24 funded pediatric beds. In 2021, it only had 16. The number of available inpatient pediatric beds is also disproportionate to the number of children and youth that live in the region, Adams says.
A release from Surrey Hospitals Foundation states that B.C. has a total of 442 pediatric inpatient and mental health beds. Surrey only has 36 of those beds, “which only represents eight per cent when 41 per cent of B.C.’s children and youth live in the Fraser Health region.”
“We are also working to expand our inpatient pediatric bed capacity at our regional sites for children who do need to be admitted to hospital,” Dr. Murray said.
If it is not a medical emergency, Dr. Murray recommends calling your family doctor or if they are unavailable going to an urgent care centre.
Surrey has two urgent and primary care centres. One is located in Netwon (6830 King George Blvd) and the other is in Whalley (Unit G2 9639 137A Street).
– With files from The Canadian Press
anna.burns@surreynowleader.com
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