MLA says lack of beds, not staff, is causing long wait times at Eagle Ridge Hospital. The nurses union disagrees.

The BC Nurses Union disagrees with the Port Moody-Burquitlam MLA’s social media post on the reasons for long wait times at the Eagle Ridge Hospital (ERH) emergency department.

On Nov. 29, MLA Rick Glumac posted in a local community Facebook group, explaining he had spoken with the executive team at ERH who told him the long waits at Eagle Ridge Hospital wasn’t “so much staffing” but lack of beds.

“From the nurses perspective, this is fundamentally a staffing issue,” said Wendy Gibbs, the BC Nurses’ Union (BCNU) regional council member for Simon Fraser, in an interview with the Dispatch.

“Despite recent efforts, staffing and resources in the Eagle Ridge Hospital emergency department remain critically stretched. Fraser Health has not added any new ER beds, and they’re leaving the nurses to manage increasing patient volumes without adequate support,” she said.

She added that Fraser Health, the health authority that runs ERH, recently delayed the implementation of minimum nurse-patient ratios at ERH in some of the med surge areas.

Minimum ratios are an agreement the union has with the government on the number of patients a nurse looks after at a time, depending on the patient’s acuity. Without this, Gibbs said patient outcomes aren’t as good.

The Dispatch reached out to the Fraser Health Authority but they didn’t respond by deadline.

In Glumac’s post, he said the executive team at ERH told him that they are currently expanding their acute bed base.

“This will increase flow of admitted patients out of the Emergency Department, thereby reducing space bottlenecks for staff to provide care to patients,” he wrote.

He added that ERH is relocating non-acute services to another site, to “optimize the flow of patients through the hospital.”

Gibbs said she agrees there is a bottleneck, but reiterated that every unit at ERH faces staffing challenges.

“Particularly in the emergency department, where the patient acuity is high and workloads are unpredictable,” she said.

The Dispatch asked BCNU for exact numbers on what the staffing shortages are at ERH, but they said they aren’t provided with those numbers on a regular basis.

Staffing shortages

Last spring, Kaitlin Stockton, a former ERH emergency room doctor, filed a civil claim where she alleged that Fraser Health had failed to remedy unsafe working conditions, ignored resource shortages, and hasn’t protected staff and patients.

According the claim, ERH and Royal Columbian routinely operate with a shortage of four to six emergency physicians shifts each day, which result to wait times of up to 14 hours.

In 2023, a group of physicians from ERH and Royal Columbian Hospital wrote an open letter where they stated they were at a “breaking point.”

The letter describes a severe shortage of physicians and emergency nurses, resulting in long wait times, overcrowding, and patients leaving without treatment.

“Eagle Ridge hospital is the main concern,” a doctor told the Dispatch at the time. “We’ve been on the brink of closure a couple of times.”