Surrey Memorial Hospital considering leased housing, including hotels, to ease overcrowding | CBC News

The health authority that oversees one of B.C.’s busiest hospitals is looking at leasing transitional housing for patients who no longer need urgent care, hoping that moving those patients off-site will reduce the overcrowding that’s plagued the hospital for months.

Fraser Health said on Tuesday that the housing would be for patients who don’t require acute care but who cannot go home for a variety of reasons. Nearby hotels are being considered as a possible option for leased space.

“Fraser Health will be providing nearby accommodations for patients who require a short stay in a transitional housing environment. These patients typically no longer need acute care services, and can safely be discharged from Surrey Memorial Hospital to receive more appropriate care in a transitional housing environment. The transitional housing spaces will offer on-site community supports such as nursing, allied health and security,” read an emailed statement.

“We will have more to say about this in the coming weeks.”

Fraser Health is the latest health authority in Canada to look at transitional housing for extra room while it deals with a lack of space within its own walls.

The strategy, which has been used in Ontario and Nova Scotia, is welcomed by some physicians desperate for more beds. But some see it as a symptom of the greater pressure on B.C.’s health-care system.

“It is always concerning when you have patients who are either discharged or still admitted for the purposes of receiving hospital care to be in facilities that are not hospitals,” said Andrew Longhurst, a health policy researcher and PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.

“I think it speaks to the really overburdened nature of our health-care system at the moment.”

Hospital overcrowded for years

Overcrowding has been well-documented at Surrey Memorial Hospital, which serves one of the fastest-growing cities in B.C. Physicians across multiple departments spoke this spring about the workload having compromised patient safety, including leaving people dying in hallways and potentially contributing to the death of a newborn baby in 2020.

WATCH | Obstetrician describes ‘scary’ situation in hospital’s birthing unit:

The provincial government announced more funding for the hospital in June. Fraser Health said the leased housing would be part of the solution to the overcrowding discussed at the time, but did not make a spokesperson available to CBC News to provide more details on the transition centres.

B.C.’s Ministry of Health deferred to Fraser Health for comment.

Claudine Storness-Bliss, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Surrey Memorial Hospital, said the housing could help if it frees up beds, but determining which patients stay and which patients move could be challenging.

“Do I think it’s a long-term solution? Absolutely not … but we don’t have enough beds to accommodate everybody right now,” she said. “I think there needs to be very, very, very, very clear guidelines as to how to make those decisions.”

Transitional centres are a growing trend in Ontario. Hospitals in Ottawa, for example, have transferred patients who no longer need acute care into transitional care units in retirement and long-term care homes, while a converted hotel in Hamilton has been used as a “decanting facility” for the local hospital.

In Nova Scotia, health officials are opening a new transitional care centre in the Bedford community sometime next year. The 68-bed centre, near Halifax, will also act as a middle ground for patients who don’t need long-term acute care but can’t go home.

Providing alternate level of care

The facilities were designated for patients who need what’s called an alternate level of care, or ALC.

Some of those patients still need physical therapy, while others are waiting for space in a long-term care facility or some form of affordable housing. Fifteen doctors and more than 100 nurses worked at the facility in Hamilton to meet some of those needs, while providing access to specialists like speech pathologists and social workers. 

Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health and the University Health Network in Toronto, said patients with an ALC designation fill roughly 15 per cent of acute-care hospital beds across Canada — meaning one in nearly seven hospital beds are occupied by patients who don’t need to be there, but have nowhere else to go.

Longhurst, the health-care researcher, says transitional centres can be helpful as a short-term solution, but don’t address the root causes of hospital overcrowding.

He said health-care officials need to lighten the load on hospitals by introducing measures like indoor masking to reduce the spread of COVID-19 — especially during a “tripledemic” flu season — and provide better access to primary care, so people aren’t left with the hospital as their only option.

“I think it’s deeply troubling,” Longhurst said. “Provincial health systems across this country are in severe distress, and yet we seem to have an absence of leadership and people willing to talk about how we try to reduce the burden on health services.”

Storness-Bliss agreed the wider system needs an overhaul.

“We need to stop putting Band-Aids on broken bones,” she said.