Eagle Ridge Hospital emergency closure signs false: health authority
Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West says there needs to be more health care resources in the Tri-Cities, following an incident that shined a light on lack of emergency room space at local hospital
Multiple signs saying Eagle Ridge Hospital closed its emergency department due to overcapacity earlier this week are false, said Fraser Health.
The hospital and its emergency beds were open all day Monday despite rumours on social media, according to Amory Wong, senior communications consultant at Fraser Health.
“There was a sign that was not ours and we didn’t post,” Wong told The Dispatch. “It said our emergency department was turning people away, but it was not our sign and we did not post it.”
Local news that matters to you
No one covers the Tri-Cities like we do. But we need your help to keep our community journalism sustainable.
The signs began circulating on social media on Monday evening, declaring the emergency department at Eagle Ridge Hospital was closed due to a lack of bed space.
The Port Moody-based hospital is the only hospital within the Tri-Cities, and one of 12 hospitals under the oversight of Fraser Health, which serves over two million people. The signs, posted on the walls of the emergency department, urged residents to call on Mike Farnworth, Port Coquitlam MLA, to fix wait times for emergency care.
Please Help us Advocate to Keep the Emergency Department Beds Open for Emergency Department Patients so That We Can Do Our Jobs and Attend to Every Patient Requiring Emergency Care in a Timely Fashion, stated one sign.
The signs have been taken down. A source has not been identified, Fraser Health said.
On Tuesday morning, Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West wrote on social media that he was disturbed to hear Eagle Ridge Hospital was turning residents away.
In an email to The Dispatch, West said his comments were not based on the signs, which he believes were put up by frustrated staff.
He wrote the post to place a spotlight on the long wait times at Eagle Ridge Hospital’s emergency department. The long waits have led some front line staff at Eagle Ridge Hospital to tell locals they should consider going to a different hospital, West said.
“This is basically a functional closure for patients requiring care,” West said. “The Tri-Cities has a fast-growing population and the current health care system is struggling to meet those needs.”
Three residents contacted him regarding long wait times at Eagle Ridge Hospital.
The wait time at Eagle Ridge Hospital’s emergency department was 3 hours and 56 minutes, as of Tuesday afternoon. Similar wait times at Royal Columbian Hospital and Vancouver General Hospital were 3 hours and 47 minutes and 3 hours, respectively, at the same time.
Eagle Ridge Hospital opened in 1984, with about 20,000 people seeking emergency care annually.
Since then, the Tri-Cities has had a major population boom.
Over the past 20 years, specifically, the region’s population has grown to roughly 250,000 people. The Tri-Cities is expected to add another 133,000 residents by 2050, despite only having one dedicated hospital. (Fraser Health also runs an urgent care facility at 3105 Murray Street in Port Moody for walk-in cases.)
Eagle Ridge Hospital now sees around 50,000 patients per year, according to FOI releases.
To cope with the increase, Eagle Ridge Hospital completed a two-part, $37.5 million upgrade to its emergency department in 2022, tripling its size and increasing the number of treatment rooms from 19 to 39.
Despite the upgrades, last year, Eagle Ridge staff warned that a lack of hospitalist physicians and emergency nurses were leading to long wait times, overcrowding and people leaving without treatment.
At the time, staff co-wrote a letter with physicians from Royal Columbian Hospital, outlining that the hospitals were at a “breaking point.”
Last year, one physician told The Dispatch that Eagle Ridge Hospital was implementing “stop-gap” measures — offering overtime and asking nurses from other hospitals or agencies to meet the minimum requirement to operate.
“Eagle Ridge hospital is the main concern,” the physician told The Dispatch in 2023. “We’ve been on the brink of closure a couple of times.”
Health care access has been a struggle for many people in B.C. in recent years.
About one in five B.C. residents don’t have a family doctor, the lowest rate among provinces outside of Atlantic Canada and the territories.
The report came roughly one year after a 2023 poll led by Leger and the Vancouver Sun found more than half of British Columbians who landed in an emergency room within the past six months said they faced unacceptable wait times.
Author
