Code White calls and violent incidents are on the rise at Surrey Memorial Hospital.
The hospital, which has one of the busiest emergency rooms in the province, experiences the most Code Whites in Fraser Health, officials confirm.
The response is initiated in situations where a patient is behaving in a potentially dangerous manner towards themselves or others and indicates a potential for escalating, or is escalating beyond the abilities of the present staff to control the situation, Fraser Health interim executive director for people, health, well-being and safety Quinn Danyluk said Friday (Nov. 14).
The hospital’s dubious distinction of having the most such situations is “largely due to the size of the hospital and the number of patients that they see,” said Danyluk.
“What happens in those situations is, staff will call a Code White, which is an overhead call in the system, and there’s a trained team of Code White responders that include security (who) will respond to the situation to try and de-escalate it. So it’s a means of trying to manage or prevent a harmful situation from happening.”
This year, there were 634 Code Whites called at SMH between January and July, an increase of about 9.5 per cent over the 579 Code Whites called at the hospital over the same time period in 2024, Danyluk said.
Code Whites don’t necessarily include all violent incidents, since they’re meant to help mitigate and prevent violence from happening, he explained.
From January to July this year, there were 125 violent incidents reported by SMH staff, an increase of three per cent from the 121 reported incidents over the same time period in 2024.
Danyluk said Fraser Health is “actively strengthening a lot of our violence prevention and our response activities” to help “ensure that our hospitals remain safe, respectful, and supportive environments.”
“We have integrated security to support our staff and medical staff. We have joint occupational health and safety committees that include unions, and we partner with them to review all incidents and suggest improvements on how we can improve,” he continued.
As well, “we have a regional violence-prevention committee that co-ordinates a lot of our activities.”
Danyluk said Fraser Health also has a team of dedicated violence-prevention specialists who look at violent incidents for ways that the health authority can mitigate and reduce them.
“In all of our departments, we do violence risk assessments to, again, look at opportunities to reduce the potential for violence. All of our staff go through violence-prevention training and we have Code White procedures and training,” said Danyluk.
In October, the the B.C. Nurses’ Union ramped up pressure on the province to do more to reduce violence in hospitals.
“If nurses aren’t safe, if the health-care staff aren’t safe, there are impacts on patient care,” union president Adriane Gear said at the time.
Gear also noted that the union is seeing increasing WorkSafeBC claims involving lost time related to violent incidents, with reports up by about 53 to 55 per cent since 2015.
— with files from Mark Page
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