Paramedics wheel a patient into Delta Hospital on Monday. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /Postmedia News
Vancouver Sun By Alec Lazenby Published Feb 24, 2025
Delta Mayor George Harvie is concerned staffing shortages could force the hospital to close its ER for full-day periods
Overnight ER closures at Delta Hospital on Saturday and Sunday show the hospital staffing crisis is not confined to rural areas but affects every community in the province, observers said Monday.
“I’ve talked a lot about how our health-care system is just being put together with Scotch Tape and wet paper,” said Dr. Rita McCracken, a family physician and assistant professor in the UBC family practice department.
“The emergency department is our last line of defense for people getting access to health care, so we need to figure this out right away.”
Health Minister Josie Osborne said Monday the government is doing everything it can to ensure closures like the ones in Delta are avoided but acknowledged plenty of work remains to be done to fix staffing shortages.
“When you need emergency care, you need it to be there. So it’s definitely, understandably incredibly disconcerting, to say the least,” she said.
“There are shortages sometimes in physicians or nurses, they can be quite last minute in certain cases, when somebody is ill and when people are on leave for various reasons. And so this is why it’s so important to have enough health-care workers in our B.C. public health-care system to be able to do this work.”
Osborne said her ministry has been working hard to try to attract health-care workers from other countries to come to B.C., a process the province is trying to make easier through updates to its credentialing requirements.
She said those efforts are starting to bear fruit with a 40 per cent drop in service interruptions in the province in the past six months. Longer-term plans to build a new medical school at SFU and expand the one at UBC will further help drive down the number of closures.
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In a statement, Fraser Health said five patients were diverted during the Saturday night closure, with four taken to Richmond Hospital and the fifth to Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock.
On Sunday, two patients were taken to Richmond Hospital by ambulance.
Merritt and Clearwater hospitals also had overnight ER closures over the weekend, continuing the struggles facing those two communities in recent months.
B.C. Nurses’ Union President Adriane Gear said the problem with sending patients to Richmond and Surrey is that those communities are already struggling to keep up with demand and receiving patients from Delta Hospital only further stretches their resources.
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Improving incentives for physicians won’t change the fact that B.C. is facing an acute shortage of health-care workers of all stripes, says McCracken.
She said the province needs to do everything it can, including increasing the amount of people being trained in B.C. and ensuring workers aren’t being bogged down with administrative work.
While the focus is now on Delta, with closures at Mission Memorial Hospital in August receiving similar attention, Paul Adams of the B.C. Rural Health Network said rural communities have long served as the “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the province.
He said places like Port Hardy and Alert Bay have had permanent weekend closures for a number of years while hospitals in New Denver and Merritt have had their ERs closed for days on end.
“When you look at all of those, you know it’s in the thousands a year,” said Adams. “If you’re looking up north, this weekend, we had closures happening in Burns Lake, in the Lake Country hospital, and the closest hospital to them is an hour and a half away, and they may only have one ambulance available for the entire community.”
