Woman describes Surrey Memorial Hospital as ‘hell’

A pneumonia patient from Delta was so disappointed with her stay at the newly-renovated Surrey Memorial Hospital that she kept a diary she says underscores the need for more staffing and better sanitary conditions.

Angelica Wrobbel, 67, was transferred from Delta Hospital on Oct. 20 to the third floor of Surrey Memorial’s general ward after her lung was damaged during a fluid-draining procedure. Once there, she said she often ate next to the soiled lining of her commode, which was left to sit beside her bed for hours and at one time was stacked beside two others.

She also says she had to wait four hours for a leaking drainage tube to be properly reattached and on the last night of her five-day stay was transferred to a lounge area “cold as an igloo” to make way for another patient.

“You shouldn’t have breakfast beside your excrement,” Wrobbel said while recuperating Sunday back home in her Delta apartment. “There’s so much advertising now about the new emergency department and how state of the art it is and yet, when you get in the ward it’s hell.”

She said each nurse was flustered trying to treat up to 10 patients at a time and that calls for help often went unanswered.

“The nurses were trying to do what they can, but it was just not enough,” Wrobbel said.

Debra McPherson, president of the B.C. Nurses’ Union, said that a nurse should only have about four patients to treat, but often they are tending to six to eight.

“I don’t know much about what’s going on (at Surrey Memorial) in terms of the staffing there, but what I do know is generally throughout the system our nurses have been working short-staffed with very heavy patient loads,” McPherson said. She added that nurses generally do their best to promptly empty commodes — chairs with built-in bedpans — but “when you’re looking after so many patients, if they’re really sick you have to make priorities.”

Fraser Health, the authority that runs Surrey Memorial, was unavailable for comment Sunday, but released a statement last week that it has added 1,000 nurses and invested $10 million in specialty nursing education over the past three years.

In early October, the Fraser Health authority opened Surrey Memorial Hospital’s new emergency department, which cost more than $500 million.

About 472,000 people now call Surrey home, but the city predicts that number will jump by more than 300,000 over the next 30 years, and by 2046 one quarter of all Metro Vancouver residents are expected to live there.

Last week, Health Minister Terry Lake announced a review to probe persistent fiscal difficulties and hospital congestion issues that have plagued the fastest growing health authority in the province.

Fraser Health Authority’s population grew an average 1.3 per cent annually over the past three years and the authority received, on average, a six per cent budget increase each of those years. Other health authorities received an average 4.8 per cent annual budget increase.

With files from Canadian Press

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