Fraser Health chairman says there’s no promises when it comes to Delta ER staffing

The chairman of Fraser Health’s board of directors said he couldn’t promise overnight that closures of Delta’s emergency room wouldn’t happen again.

“I’m hopeful that we won’t have that problem, and that Delta is a blip,” Jim Sinclair told reporters following a public board meeting in Surrey on Wednesday. “But there are some issues that have to be dealt with.”

His comments came days after several emergency rooms in the  Fraser Health Authority closed over the weekend, including back-to-back overnight closures of Delta’s ER on Saturday and Sunday.

There were also overnight closures of emergency rooms in Merritt and Clearwater.

Sinclair acknowledged that working conditions at some Fraser Health hospitals were a contributing factor, saying authorities are working to fill staffing vacancies “on almost a weekly basis.”

“You suddenly have two doctors sick, and that can shut down the emergency room,” he said.

Dr. Charlene Lui, Doctors of B.C. president, said in an earlier interview with Postmedia News that Delta Hospital is a particularly hard place to work since it doesn’t have an ICU or complex care unit.

“Doctors actually are responsible for taking care of these highly complex, very sick patients until they can get transferred to another hospital where they can be taken care of in an ICU or CCU,” said Lui. “So it does make that hospital a higher stress location to work. The emergency room doctors are actually usually the only doctors on-site in the evening and at night.”

In a presentation during the board meeting, he said the health authority had hired at least 790 new nurses, including 650 foreign-trained ones, and 510 new physicians in the past two years, as well as employing an additional 1,000 student nurses.

“I’m optimistic that we’ll continue to have emergencies open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that I can promise here today that we’re going to be committed to making that happen,” Sinclair said.

He acknowledged that turnover, particularly in emergency rooms, was an issue but said work was underway to address what he called the “root causes of these problems.”

“At Surrey Memorial Hospital, we have a whole team of people that just take care of the people that are waiting. That wasn’t true seven months ago,” he said. “We want to find a way for doctors to be able to come to work in emergency (rooms), and we know that a month from now, we have people that are going to come to work.”

Sinclair admitted that Fraser Health was facing “real challenges, and those challenges have been here for a long time.”

He spoke well of Fraser Health’s previous president and CEO, Dr. Victoria Lee, whose “mutually agreed” departure was announced by the board on Feb. 18, “effective immediately.”

“It was time for leadership to change and to bring in some new perspectives, to bring in some new ideas and review the future,” Sinclair said. “I don’t point fingers at anybody. We’re looking at the future to fix these issues and move forward.”

With files from Alec Lazenby