The director of the Intensive Care Unit of Surrey Memorial Hospital has resigned in protest to the ER doctors refusing to provide Code Blue services to ICU patients in cardiac arrest.
Dr. Grant McCormack told the Surrey Now newspaper he does not agree with the way the medical administration at Fraser Health was responding to the ultimatum by the emergency doctors to withdraw the coverage of Code Blue services at the Surrey hospital.
Code Blue is activated in the event of a respiratory/cardiac arrest or a life-threatening emergency.
But since the article in the newspaper, emergency room doctors have said they will provide services to ICU patients when asked to do so.
“Surrey Memorial Hospital just opened a big new emergency department,” says Dr. Urbain Ip, Surrey Memorial Hospital medical coordinator. “But for the longest time the volume of the hospital has been increasing and the hospital has been getting very big, it’s the second largest hospital in B.C. Emergency physicians go to all cardiac arrest situations in the hospital. With the volume increase, often, you know the emergency physician often have a critically-ill patient that they’re taking care of and they have a little bit of worry that sometimes they cannot get to, for instance in the ICU where the patient arrests and traditionally they run over there to assist the ICU to run the arrest and that’s Code Blue.”
“The discussion has been, the emergency group asked the intensive care physicians to help them out by saying, if you have a cardiac arrest to sort of step up and do their own Code Blue or run their own cardiac arrest management. They’re intensive care physicians so they are very very good at that, They are very competent at running cardiac arrests, so that, the cardiac arrests in the rest of the hospital, the emergency physicians are still going there because they know that they would have to support that.”
Ip says patient care will not be compromised.
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“I talk to the physicians and the front line, like the physician that is doing the work every day, I have not heard a single word that they’re not going to be stepping up to the plate and go to the cardiac arrest when they need assistance. Both the ICU physicians and the emergency physicians have promised me that care would not be compromised.”
“I think it’s more of the change that sometimes it’s hard for people to not understand, or doesn’t want to change, but I think this will come to a conclusion that at the end, the two groups are going to collaboratively find a way to agree that what is the best way to agree with cardiac arrest patients in this hospital.”
ICU doctors are not always available, especially overnight, and emergency doctors are in the best position to handle these cases.
Ip says there are times when the ICU is quiet, or it’s the middle of the night, when there would not be an ICU doctor to respond to the cardiac arrest call. However, he says there are other staff members there are who fully trained to deal with these situations, and the emergency physician, upon request, will also respond to the call.
“Most of the time there are a million people up there that are taking care of patients,” says Ip. “Most of the time, as a matter of fact, they are able to competently, efficiently, taking care of cardiac arrests in that unit.”
“The issue is that, the emergency physicians, because of the volume, with high volume and high acuity, one of the things that, there will be times, that say in the middle of the day, they’re taking care of a really critically ill septic patient, Code Blue call come in, in the middle of the day they know that, well ICU they’re doing rounds up there, perhaps they don’t have to be the primary responder, but saying that, if they say that ‘hey we need your help’, because sometimes we do need two, three doctors up there to look after the patient because there are different difficulties that they run into, the emergency physicians say they will run up there when they have that request.
So I think it’s not a big change really.”
The regional department head of the ICU Fraser Health will step into McCormack’s shoes and run the ICU.
McCormack did not return Global News’ calls for comment, but he is still working as a physician at the hospital.
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