Mom gives birth in triage area amid Surrey Memorial staffing crisis

A mother who gave birth in the triage waiting area at Surrey Memorial Hospital last month holds her newborn at home. (Submitted)

It was approaching midnight when a woman arrived at Surrey Memorial Hospital’s Maternity Unit for the third time on May 2, hoping to finally be admitted and give birth to her third child.

She’d been induced that afternoon, and came back once more only to be told to go home again. Now, her contractions were intense and five minutes apart, and the pain was fierce. Plus, she knew from her previous two births that labour could be quick.

But at 4 cm dilated, the mother was told she was too far along for morphine or Gravol. When she asked for an epidural, the nurse told her she couldn’t get one because she was still in triage.

“I was like, ‘Excuse me? What do you mean?'” she told Daily Hive. “This was me between contractions trying to have this conversation. The pain was unbearable. I was yelping.”

The woman, who Daily Hive is not identifying because she works for Fraser Health and fears professional repercussions, is speaking out about the horrible birth experience at Surrey Memorial as doctors at the institution plead for help with its dangerously low staffing levels.

She said nurses told her there were no rooms available. All they had was a bed to rest on in the triage waiting area — separated from other women, earlier on in their labour, by a curtain.

The Surrey resident asked if she could go to another hospital, but staff said it wouldn’t be safe for her to leave — and she didn’t want to “have a baby on the side of the road.”

“I said, ‘Put me in a shared room just so I can get some pain relief. How about a C-section?’ I was so desperate for anything to help me,” she said. “I was screaming every time a contraction came. They gave me gas, but it didn’t work. I remember crying to my husband, nothing is working.”

At one point, the mother’s screams alarmed the nurses, and one came running in to find she was 7 cm dilated. Within five minutes, her water broke and she jumped to 9 cm.

She ended up giving birth right there in the triage waiting area, unable to get a room or one-to-one care. There was no doctor present — the triage nurse and her husband delivered the baby.

“It’s so vulnerable at that point in time. All you really need is [the] support of people around you, and you need that pain relief,” she said. “I was willing to share a room. I was willing to go to another hospital. But I was not able to get any of that stuff.”

The mother poses for a picture with her newborn (Submitted)

Once the baby came out, she was taken to a private room to recover. There, she asked a doctor why she couldn’t have been transferred while labouring — and said the physician told her there were plenty of rooms, but not enough nurses to manage them. As for the epidural, it was the same. No nurse could be spared to provide it.

“I was like ‘I’m sorry, what?’ I was put in that situation because you guys are short-staffed?” the mother said.

She said the doctor revealed there were only 14 nurses on that night, when there were supposed to be 24. The doctor was very apologetic and encouraged the mother to speak up about what happened.

“So much could have gone wrong,” the woman said. “I’m grateful that this was my third baby. I can’t imagine if someone was having their first child and going through that. I don’t think they’d want to have any more kids, just because of the labour part. I would not want to wish that on anybody.”

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In addition to delivering in the triage area, the mother was GBS-positive, a type of naturally occurring bacteria that can be passed to the baby during birth and cause meningitis or a blood infection. Mothers who test positive for the bacteria are supposed to take an antibiotic several hours before they give birth to prevent transmission — the woman said staff at Surrey Memorial never gave it to her even though she asked for it.

The chaotic birth of her third baby comes after another frightening experience giving birth to her second child at Surrey Memorial in November 2020. In that case, she called in multiple times about her contractions and asked for the same antibiotics, but was told to stay at home. When she finally came to the hospital, after spending 30 minutes in the Maternity Unit waiting area, she was already 9 cm dilated at first assessment — too late for antibiotics or an epidural. Her baby was born 15 minutes later, and she had to stay in the hospital for a week with her newborn because of the bacteria.

Both experiences left her feeling traumatized, and for the first time wondering if she should have gone to the US to give birth — where she also has coverage.

“My husband is a retired US Army vet, and he explained to me the look I had on my face for days, weeks after [the third birth] was just shell shocked,” she said. “I’ve had to work extremely hard just getting out of the house or talking to people, just getting my mind off of it to avoid postpartum depression.”

surrey memorial hospital critical care tower emergency department

Exterior of the 2013-built expansion of Surrey Memorial Hospital and its emergency department. (Naturally Wood)

Her story comes as doctors at Surrey Memorial raise the alarm over dangerous under-staffing at the hospital, which they say has led to the death of one newborn so far.

Thirty-six doctors in the Obstetrics and Gynecology units at the hospital signed a letter explaining the crisis conditions at Surrey Memorial, suggesting the mother who spoke to Daily Hive may be one of many.

“[The] mismatch in resources has resulted in a newborn death, countless near misses, and moral injury to our care providers,” the doctors say. “Women often lack access to effective pain management and do not receive the necessary privacy during and after childbirth.”

The hospital serves a larger population than Vancouver, but the doctors say it has half the number of beds. The Maternity Unit oversees 6,000 births a year, but it was last updated at a time when fewer than 2,000 deliveries per year were happening, according to the letter.

The provincial government’s estimates indicate that approximately 1,000 people move to Surrey every month, and the city’s population is growing at a rate of nearly 10% per year. It’s meant a bottleneck for services such as healthcare, and the crisis has caught the attention of Health Minister Adrian Dix.

He held a news conference last week where he said improvements are coming to the hospital. Those include additional funding for more nurses and doctors, working with hospitalist physicians to finalize a new contract, and expanding the hours of nearby urgent and primary care centres.

“We will be expanding the existing Surrey Memorial by improving and increasing capacity for more inpatient and outpatient care, surgeries, and critical programs,” Dix said.

He also pointed to a completely new hospital being built in Cloverdale as something that could provide relief to the overburdened Surrey Memorial.

Daily Hive reached out to Fraser Health for comment, but the health authority did not respond before publication deadline. This story will be updated when a comment is provided.

The Surrey mother knows resources are stretched. She’s had all three of her children at Surrey Memorial and said her firstborn’s delivery went smoothly. But that’s not the case anymore.

“There’s a broken system in place and not enough people trying to solve it,” she said. “I hope nobody else experiences what I experienced.”