Dear Editor,
[RE: Maternity diversion from Ridge Meadows Hospital starting Thursday, May 20, The News]
The maternity ward at Ridge Meadows Hospital is repeatedly closed due to staff shortages.
Instructions to mothers in labour are to travel to other cities, which ignores the realities of childbirth.
The hospital is five minutes from my home, and my labour lasted 90 minutes total.
My midwife recognized a shoulder dystocia emergency, where minutes matter, and safely delivered my baby. Had the ward been closed, my baby might have died on Highway 1.
This is not new.
In late 2021, under the same public health leadership, Surrey Memorial Hospital induced me into labour and then denied me admission due to the nursing shortage. I was forced to drive through a snowstorm to Burnaby, and the result was an emergency C-section.
For a year, I could not talk about that trauma without crying.
B.C. is taking “baby steps” by increasing medical school seats and recruiting from the U.S., but this crisis needs “adult leaps.”
My ideas are: full grants for medical students’ expenses so school is their full-time job, eliminating individual barriers for students, incentivizing high-need specialties, and assigning support staff to guide internationally trained professionals through credential recognition.
We should also reconcile with experienced workers lost to burnout, workplace violence, policy decisions, and other systemic failures.
The government knows how to aggressively coordinate labour shortages.
Anyone who opened The Province newspaper on Feb. 9, 1972, might have read about Canada’s federal manpower department taking a human-centred approach to mass layoffs: they removed individual barriers and steered trainees and jobseekers to useful employment. The workforce was a public responsibility.
There is no excuse for our health-care system to still be this fragile when we have known about this problem for years and have the economic experience to manage it.
Jessie Disher, Maple Ridge