BC’s premier David Eby and health Minister Adrian Dix were in Surrey to break ground on the second promised hospital. While many welcomed the news, many called it an insufficient effort compared to the rapidly growing population of Surrey.
Surrey’s new hospital will be built beside the Kwantlen Polytechnic University campus at 5500 180 Street. The new Surrey hospital will have inpatient beds, an emergency department, operating rooms, laboratory and diagnostic services, and outpatient services, with a state-of-the-art BC Cancer Care Centre.
Anita Huberman, President & CEO, Surrey Board of Trade, said, “While we wait for this hospital to be built, exponential population growth continues.” Surrey needs more health infrastructure.
“The BC government never gets tired of promoting a new hospital in Surrey,” said Prof. Kuldip Pelia, Surrey Mayoral Candidate 2022, in an email. “I am glad that a new 168 bed hospital is coming to Surrey. But this won’t solve the shortage of hospital beds in Surrey. After this hospital, we’ll still be 932 beds short of the Canadian average. We need 2 more hospitals in Surrey.”
On X, formerly known as Twitter, B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon called the news from the NDP government a re-announcement, with the delays and a ballooning budget disappointing. “Eby and the NDP continue to fail residents of Surrey,” he wrote.
Dr. Randeep Gill, an Emergency Room physician at Surrey Memorial Hospital (SMH) who has been advocating for more healthcare funding South of the Fraser, in a previous interview with The Link has appreciated these efforts but contended that they fall short of resolving the crisis. Despite the promised new hospital with over 150 acute care beds, he insists that this won’t suffice for the province’s fastest-growing community. Dr. Gill emphasizes that Surrey remains at 300 percent less capacity than Vancouver while dealing with an increasing immigrant and at-risk population.
A May report by the Surrey Hospitals Foundation (SHF) reveals a stark contrast between Vancouver and Surrey’s acute care bed availability. With a population of 662,000, Vancouver has access to over 3,000 beds, while Surrey, with a population of approximately 604,000, has only 634 beds—a ratio significantly below the Canadian average of 2.5 beds per thousand residents.
The report further indicates that Surrey struggles with one of the lowest ratios of community service beds per 1,000 residents in Canada. The availability of tertiary critical services at Surrey Memorial Hospital poses significant challenges. In 2021, 26,000 Surrey residents sought inpatient care at SMH, with an additional 15,000 forced to seek treatment elsewhere. Similarly, while SMH’s Emergency Department attended to 137,000 patients, 82,000 Surrey residents had to go to other hospitals for emergency care. Surgical services outside the community were also a common occurrence.
Gill organized a rally on September 9th to raise awareness about inadequate funding, resources, and healthcare infrastructure from the government South of the Fraser Region. Just a day before the rally, BC’s Health Minister Adrian Dix was present at SMH to give an update on key projects announced by the Province in June to transform health care in Surrey. “OUR action got a reaction and we haven’t even started!” he wrote on his social media account.
In June, the health minister announced that the province had identified short-term, long-term and medium-term strategies to improve care at – and even expand – Surrey’s bustling and oft-embattled hospital.
“Since our renewed commitment in June, we’ve already made significant progress and are continuing the work to further support patients and the people delivering care at the hospital,” Dix said Friday (Sept. 8) at Surrey Memorial Hospital.
Hundreds of health-care workers, politicians, business leaders and Surrey residents rallied at Surrey’s Civic Plaza on September 9 to voice their concerns about the state of health care in the region.
The demonstration put a spotlight on five critical healthcare issues in the region like unbalanced resource allocation between the north and south of the Fraser; insufficient bed capacity and inadequate hospital infrastructure; lack of a health services plan aligned with demographics and evidence-based requirements; limited access to primary and community care services, including a shortage of family doctors; and inadequate funding for specialized tertiary services like cardiac, trauma, maternity, pediatric, interventional radiology, and diagnostics.
Two days after the rally, the Province broke ground on a long-awaited and often-promised second hospital for the City of Surrey, B.C., with completion date in 2029.
“Surrey has been experiencing tremendous growth and people are struggling to get the health services they need while health-care workers are burning out,” said Premier David Eby.
“We’re taking urgent action while carefully planning for the future. As we break ground on the new, state-of-the-art Surrey hospital and cancer centre, work continues on immediate actions to improve health services in the region, so everyone gets the timely, high-quality health care they need.”
Dix informed, “The second hospital in Surrey will bring 168 more hospital beds, including medical/surgical beds, high acuity beds and medical oncology beds, and a second emergency department for the community with 55 treatment spaces and access to specialists through virtual technologies.”
But all the promises and actions of the government to cure the diminishing state of healthcare in Surrey were taken with a grain of salt.
“Health care is part of city building and economic infrastructure. There is still time to add these services into the second hospital,” continued Huberman. “As it stands, there is no emergency plan that addresses how residents living south of the Fraser will access life-saving services in the event of a natural disaster.”
