Emergency room doctors at Surrey Memorial Hospital have penned a scathing letter to the head of Fraser Health warning that “deteriorating conditions” are “unequivocally leading to substandard care.”
The letter, dated Monday and signed by the emergency department’s entire staff of physicians, is addressed to Fraser Health CEO Dr. Victoria Lee.
The doctors say they’ve made “repeated and urgent attempts” to alert Fraser Health and provincial health leadership of worsening conditions in the emergency department, but have received “little response.”
The letter goes on to lay out a number of troubling statistics.
According to the letter, the rate of patients “left without being seen” has tripled since 2020-2021, from 2.9 per cent to 8.4 per cent.
It says time to see an emergency room doctor for unwell ambulatory patients often exceeds 12 hours, “and we are projecting to be at risk of 24-hour waits in the short term.”
And the doctors say they’ve seen emergency room volumes increase by 30 per cent in the last four years, while the department has not grown in size and staffing has only grown by eight per cent.
The letter warns of a “vicious cycle” in which staff face an increasingly toxic work environment that “discourages emergency physicians from showing up for work,” increasing stress on staff who are there.
“Despite assurances from the Minister of Health that ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ is being thrown at the staffing problem, we have yet to see any practical solutions,” the letter states.
“Although it was not our responsibility to provide a solution, we invested hundreds of hours in creating and presenting a comprehensive strategy to yourself and the Ministry that aimed to improve staffing and patient care at SMH.
“Unfortunately, these discussions consumed valuable clinical resources and resulted in no meaningful action.”
Fraser Health acknowledged the letter had been received, and pledged that the concerns laid out would be thoroughly reviewed.