Delta, B.C., council writes letter to province over 'unacceptable' weekend ER closures
Mayor says it is 'unacceptable' not to have a proper, fully-staffed hospital with reliable health care
Delta council has written to the province after the Metro Vancouver community's emergency room was closed for two consecutive nights over the weekend.
Fraser Health said that the closure on Saturday and Sunday nights at Delta Hospital was due to physician staffing challenges.
Mayor George Harvie called an emergency council meeting on Monday night to discuss the ER closures, and councillors unanimously adopted three motions.
The first was to send a letter to Premier David Eby, Health Minister Josie Osborne and Fraser Health interim CEO Dr. Lynn Stevenson emphasizing the importance of the emergency department to the community.
The letter also sought information from the province and assurances that steps are being taken to ensure more closures do not happen.
"Twenty years ago there was a move to close the hospital, but we stood up as a community and fought that," said Harvie.
"And now here again, we're having closures at our emergency department, and we're going to stand up and fight to keep those emergency operations open."
The second motion invites Fraser Health representatives to the March 3 council meeting to provide a presentation to council and answer questions about how they plan to ensure adequate staffing in the future.
"We don't need summits and a whole bunch of studies," said Harvie. "Fraser Health should sit down with the hospital workers themselves — they're the ones that know what the problem is. They're the ones that will come up with solutions."
The final motion is for staff to come back to council with a resolution on the need for sustainable funding for emergency and urgent care health services throughout the province.
Harvie says he was also concerned about the minimal bus service to and from Delta, and the fact that there are often traffic incidents and delays.
"They did say to go to Surrey [ER], but when our staff checked the wait times, it was 18 hours," he said. "It's unacceptable. As mayor, and with the support of council, I'll be pushing very, very hard to ensure that this doesn't happen again."
Health minister cites training initiatives
Osborne says she has spoken with Harvie and looks forward to the letter but that the province is doing everything it can in the short and long term to keep the ER open.
"I know that Fraser Health has taken all of the steps they possibly could to try to avert this service interruption, and unfortunately, it was just unavoidable," she said on Tuesday.
Osborne says the province has opened more seats at the University of B.C.'s medical school and will open a new medical school at Simon Fraser University in Surrey in 2026, and committed to adding new nursing seats and providing incentives to cover rural health-care worker shortages.
"I really feel for the residents of Delta. It's alarming to know that an emergency department has to close like this, and I certainly can imagine in my own community what this would feel like," she said.
The health minister acknowledged, however, that ER closures were not something that could be fixed overnight.
Nowhere else to go
There is also concern about how the information about the closures was shared, with the spokesperson for the Ambulance Paramedics of B.C. saying that its members first learned about the closure through a social media post on Saturday afternoon.
"It makes me a little nervous because things happen in the middle of the night too, and then you have to figure out where you're going to go," said Delta resident Pam Probyn.
"We're a good half hour away from the next hospital."
Harvie also told CBC News that he received no information about the closures ahead of time.
He called it a public safety concern because the hospital doesn't just serve Delta and the Tsawwassen First Nation's population of 120,000, but also thousands of workers in their industrial park — one of the largest in Metro Vancouver.
"We cannot survive as a community without a proper hospital that has an emergency department that is fully staffed and functioning to today's standards," the mayor said.
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With files from Michelle Morton