‘It's soul-crushing’: How Surrey’s emergency room strains impact patients and health-care workers

Thelma Pritchard waited hours for emergency care at Surrey Memorial Hospital last summer — in a hallway.

After waiting an hour for an ambulance to arrive, Pritchard and her daughter, Shara Lynn Nixon, went without a room because none were available.

“She was placed in front of a cart that the doctors used to get bandages for wounds,” Nixon says. “Every time any emergency room doctor needed access to that cart, they had to move her bed…. Every time they moved her, it made the pain worse.”

Pritchard, who was 99-years-old at the time, has dementia and had fallen and broken her leg. At the hospital, she would try to stand up not realizing her leg was broken.

Fraser Health, the regional health authority that manages Surrey Memorial Hospital, wrote in a statement that it’s committed to quality care for Surrey and south of the Fraser communities.

The B.C. Ministry of Health wrote to The Runner that “like other jurisdictions in Canada, B.C. is experiencing higher emergency department volumes and higher acuity patients in hospitals.”

“We understand that long waits can be challenging for patients and their families,” the ministry wrote, adding that it added 727 acute care beds in November 2023.

After Nixon requested to move her mother somewhere else, hospital staff relocated them to a narrow part of the hallway, she says.

Throughout the evening, multiple code white alarms — meaning violence or aggressive behaviour — went off, with police and security running past them, requiring Nixon to pull her chair out of the way quickly.

Although Pritchard was given some pain-relief medicine, she didn’t see much support from nursing staff or doctors.

“They weren’t rude. They were just busy. She wasn’t dying — and other people were. She was basically left in the hall with me for hours with no real care or treatment other than this shot she had been given for pain,” Nixon says.

The first doctor who examined Pritchard suspected she had a broken leg and advised her to stay at the hospital. She would not get an X-ray confirming this until the next morning.

A second doctor agreed that her mom’s condition was deteriorating, and he got her a bed with a curtain, Nixon says.

At that point, both had not slept for 24 hours.

“I felt very bad for the staff that worked there, because how can you maintain any sort of mental health when you are faced with the overwhelming workload of an ER with double its capacity?” she says.

Surrey Memorial Hospital is the city’s only hospital and the second largest in the province. It’s also home to B.C.’s busiest emergency department, which is the second largest in the country.

The city’s population is expected to overtake Vancouver’s by 2038 to become B.C.’s largest city. In July 2025, Surrey’s population was estimated at 726,369.

A second hospital and BC Cancer Centre are under construction in Cloverdale, behind Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Tech campus, and set to open in 2030.

Peggy Holton, a South Fraser Valley council member at the BC Nurses’ Union, says Surrey Memorial’s ER sees between 14,000 and 15,000 people a month, ranging from an upwards of 650 people a day.

On average, the wait time to see a doctor ranges from six to eight hours, she says.

​“Rarely is it less than that, but it often will exceed 16 hours,” Holton says. “People have taken to acknowledging the fact that if they want health care, they have to be prepared to wait.”

Randeep Gill, an ER doctor at Surrey Memorial Hospital and clinical instructor at the University of British Columbia, says a lack of infrastructure of inpatient beds is contributing to long wait times in the emergency department.

Gill says the hospital admits 12,000 to 15,000 patients annually, but only has about 650 to 680 beds.

“Once [patients] get admitted, they have nowhere to go,” he says. “There’s no room, there are no beds upstairs, so those patients end up staying in the emergency department, in and around those rooms that are being occupied.” 

Gill says it’s tough to go to work on a daily basis knowing health-care workers don’t have the support they need, especially compared to other regions like Vancouver.

There are six hospitals in Vancouver with emergency departments. Vancouver General Hospital has more than 1,000 beds — the third highest in Canada.

There are also work constraints, Gill says, where nursing staff and resources are allocated to patients who are already admitted, leaving fewer opportunities to care for new patients.

As a result, he says there are massive delays in care.

“A lot of the stuff that we see should be mitigated by family doctors. But because patients don’t have family doctors, they end up coming to the emergency department,” Gill says.

In March, the City of Surrey announced two community medical clinics in Newton and City Centre to help residents access a family doctor and primary care.

Surrey’s corporate services general manager, Joey Brar, says the clinics will reduce pressure on ERs to handle non-emergency situations.

“Having access to family doctors has immense benefits. It allows people to have regular, ongoing care … that heads off a lot of more chronic issues that impact residents’ health,” Brar says.

B.C.’s health ministry wrote that 224,000 people were connected with a primary care provider in fiscal 2025-26. The ministry added that it’s the highest since tracking began in 2023 when it launched its Health Connect Registry.

Gill has seen Surrey Memorial evolve over his 12 years in the ER.

“It’s soul-crushing…. We want to service our community the best that we can, especially being born and living in Surrey, and it does hurt morale,” he says. “What makes the headlines is usually the wait times and the tough times — and rightfully so.”

Gill wants to see a second critical care tower and expanded trauma service.

Surrey Memorial has a level four trauma centre — just 15 minutes away at New Westminster’s Royal Columbian Hospital is a level one trauma centre.

In April 2023, an Abbotsford teen was fatally stabbed near King George SkyTrain Station, just minutes from Surrey Memorial. Yet, he was taken to Royal Columbian instead.

“All health authorities within B.C. [utilize a regional network of sites] in which specific designated hospitals are considered higher level of care for various specialized services, including stroke, trauma, cardiac, and speciality pediatric services,” Fraser Health wrote.

Gill adds there isn’t need for another community hospital, but there is for subspecialty care, like neurosurgery.

“We have zero neurosurgeons south of the Fraser, not a single one. If anybody has a spinal injury, stroke, or brain tumour — nothing can be taken care of,” Gill says. “It makes it very, very difficult to continue to work in an environment like this.”

The Cloverdale hospital will not have a maternity ward or pediatric services including an intensive care unit, which Gill says are also needed to lessen the burden on Surrey Memorial.

Health-care issues don’t end in Surrey as Royal Columbian Hospital, also operated by Fraser Health, experiences significant wait times, too.

An ER nurse at Royal Columbian, who asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, says nurses suffer from burnout and have almost no downtime with patients in the waiting room.

“Our staffing is crappy because we have all these new people come in,” the nurse says, adding that some nurses are gone between six months and a year.

The nurse says that Fraser Health sees staff as numbers, only cares about filling quotas, and new nurses hired straight to the ER are set up to fail.

“This is basically throwing them into the jungle and saying, ‘Here, fend for yourself and figure this out,’” the nurse says.

Holton says the BC Nurses’ Union is working hard with the province and regional authorities to implement proper nurse-to-patient ratios.

“We are working hard to strengthen not only acute care, but also primary care, by bringing new doctors and nurse practitioners into the province through fair pay, better conditions and faster credential recognition, and retaining and training more health-care workers here in B.C.,” the Ministry of Health wrote.

“B.C. is adding health-care providers faster than ever.”

U.S. recruitment efforts led to more than 2,900 job applications from March 2025 to February, the ministry wrote, adding that as of April, more than 580 health-care workers accepted job offers.

Last month, 98.2 per cent of BC Nurses’ Union members voted in favour of strike action if necessary, more than a year after their last agreement expired. The Nurses’ Bargaining Association reached a tentative agreement, which includes more funding from the health ministry to continue implementing minimum nurse-to-patient ratios.

Holton says the union sees the impact of improving ratios with less burnout and greater job satisfaction among nurses, and it’s better for patients.

“Patients are getting the care that they need, and they’re getting the standard of care they should expect,” Holton says.

​However, the ER nurse from Royal Columbian says nothing will change unless more nurses are trained and improvements are made to unsafe layouts and makeshift spaces, including hallway stretchers in the ER.

“We’re going to have those back-to-back stretchers down the hallway. I am 100 per cent sure it’s going to be a thing,” the nurse says.

Seven hospitals in B.C., including Surrey Memorial, operated at 10 to 20 per cent above capacity, with an average of 329 patients across all seven hospitals being taken care of in makeshift spaces, The Tyee reported in late 2025.

Despite the two new medical clinics and upcoming Cloverdale hospital, Surrey’s projected growth is top of mind for Holton.

“The problem is our population is going to be growing, so as soon as we build it, people come, and then we’re right back where we started off.”

Holton says that Fraser Health has been trying to build more health-care infrastructure, but securing funding and covering the massive costs of adding new buildings remain challenging.

“It’s so costly. And now, given the current times of tariffs … the cost of building is going to be even more — and the government is already strapped for money,” Holton says.

She hopes residents explore other primary care clinics, adding that people need to put pressure on the government to address ER wait times and the issues they cause.

“It’s only by doing that the government will become aware of what’s actually happening on the ground.”