Did Surrey jump ahead of RCH?

By Dan Hilborn
Published Feb. 26, 2005


Officials with the Fraser Health Authority are downplaying claims from a New Westminster surgeon that the newly announced expansion of the emergency department at Surrey Memorial Hospital could delay a planned expansion of Royal Columbian Hospital.

Dr. Peter Blair, a New Westminster-based surgeon, said recently fired health authority CEO Bob Smith was in the process of bringing forward a $183-million plan to build a five-storey, 152-bed tower at Royal Columbian when he was let go.

"Bob Smith was someone we felt was a good administrator," Blair told the Burnaby NOW this week. "He had a complete view of the Fraser Health Authority and its funding requirements and, at RCH, we knew he was interested in our future and the future development of the hospital.

"But, with his firing, we can assume the next CEO has a direct mandate from the provincial government to focus on developing Surrey Memorial Hospital over the next couple of years," Blair said Wednesday afternoon. "One of my concerns is that the needs of Royal Columbian Hospital might be overlooked.

"Mr. Smith, on more than one occasion, had talked about resurrecting the tower plan and getting that developed and fast tracked so we can have better resources," Blair said.

But Dr. Keith Anderson, the new interim CEO of the health authority, said the proposal to build a new tower - which is described in a report called the Horizon Initiative that was given to the provincial government last fall - was simply in the early discussion stages.

The 28-page report, a copy of which was provided to the Burnaby NOW this week, discusses in detail two proposed hospital additions in the health authority - a five-storey tower at Royal Columbian, plus a $105-million, six-storey addition for Surrey Memorial that would include a new emergency department on the ground floor.

The document also describes continued funding problems in Fraser Health and makes repeated references to the need to find alternative funding sources to be able to build the additions.

But Anderson denied Blair's claims that the provincial government's request to start construction on a new $28-million emergency department at Surrey ignores the recommendations in the report.

"This (the Horizon Initiative) was meant to be a conceptual, high- level, thinking document," Anderson said. "It does not represent the complete capital needs of Fraser Health because we have 12 sites. It's not a detailed business plan, it's just designed to give discussion of some scenarios - the what-ifs and ballpark questions."

Anderson said Fraser Health officials are concerned about conditions at all of their facilities and are now in the early stages of conducting an acute care capacity plan in cooperation with the provincial government. A similar study is also underway in the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

"We have capacity challenges in both acute care and home care and we're seeking to mitigate those wherever we can," he said.

Asked when the Horizon Initiative proposal for Royal Columbian Hospital might be built, Anderson replied: "That was a conceptual paper to start the discussions with government around our long-term capital needs for Columbia and Surrey, and those discussions are underway," Anderson said. "But it wasn't a detailed business plan because it lacked specificity. Some of the data is from 1999 and 2000 and it's not current.

"We need to bring forward a comprehensive plan," he said. "I'm not misleading anyone. This is not a quick fix. There is nothing to give immediate relief on the capital side. But the idea of building a tower at RCH and indeed a new addition at Surrey go back many years. Now, we're having to fully update that information and then say what's the priority No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3."

When asked if the health authority supports the province's plan to build the emergency department at Surrey Memorial first, Anderson replied, "Well, that's not a yes or no question, because you have to ensure the emergency room is well designed for the kind of people who are coming in. You have to effectively move patients from ambulances to stretchers, and even the emergency room doctors recognize that the problem is not the folks coming in the front door, it's to ensure people going out the door are going out in a timely manner."

Anderson also said he will meet with officials from the Ministry of Health Services next week to discuss future construction plans for both royal Columbian and Surrey Memorial.

"Our planning and capital departments are seeking systematically to address those issues both in the short term and the long term," he said.

But Dr. Blair said he believes the plans for Royal Columbian were put on the backburner because of all the media attention devoted to the problems in Surrey.

"We're worried about the political backlash to the exclusion of Royal Columbian Hospital," Blair said. "There's a crunch right now. Every day we operate we are worried that we won't get that day's patients into the hospital. On almost any day you walk into the emergency department and you'll see a large number of emergency patients with no bed to go to. We need more beds and we need more operating time and we need more operating space.

"The last physical construction we had was the Columbia Tower but that replaced an existing tower, it didn't give an expansion," he said. "In fact, we've had a contraction of beds in the past 15 years and I think we've innovated as much as we can with our current resources."