Surrey-White Rock MLA Trevor Halford is sounding the alarm about understaffing at Surrey Memorial Hospital over the May long weekend.
In the provincial legislature Wednesday (May 1), BC United’s Halford brought up the issue of the hospital’s Code Blue team, telling the gathered politicians that frontline workers at the hospital “have a dire warning” about understaffing.
“The Code Blue team, critical for lifesaving interventions, is less than two weeks away from having no coverage.”
“Without these experts, a heart attack on a hospital ward, it means a death sentence. Why has the premier allowed it to come to this?” Halford said.
Code Blue teams respond to patients who require resuscitation or immediate attention, often as a result of cardiac or respiratory arrest.
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Responding to Halford, Health Minister Adrian Dix noted hospitals such as SMH have Code Blue protocols in place, “especially for high-volume periods like long weekends.”
“At Surrey Memorial, we have a medical emergency team contracted — contracted — to provide 13,140 service hours of Code Blue coverage to ensure patients are cared for during cardiac emergencies, for example,” Dix said.
Dix emphasizes that Code Blue coverage, under the contract, “is provided 24 hours daily, 365 days per year … 63 physicians are participating in that contract.”
Halford noted the SMH hospital emergency room is “one of the busiest, if not the busiest, emergency rooms in Canada.”
“The fact is we are seeing critical shortages, and to highlight the fact we could have shortages when we have code blues, that is beyond alarming. That could end up in catastrophic tragedy,” Halford said Thursday (May 2).
“It’s not for lack of effort by the health-care workers — they’ve been doing their best. They’ve been sounding the alarm bells and those concerns are not being addressed by minister of health — that’s evident by the wait times we see, and the frustration we see from nurses and doctors. We hear that every day in my office… I have doctors and nurses reach out to me quite often saying the current system is broken.”
Dix maintained the provincial NDP government works proactively when issues arise around staffing with the region’s physicians.
“I talked to Dr. Victoria Lee, an outstanding physician who leads the Fraser Health Authority,” he said Wednesday.
“She assures me that there will not be an issue on Victoria Day long weekend, or any other time, with Code Blue protocols.”
Peace Arch News has reached out to Fraser Health for more detail.