The new critical care tower at Surrey Memorial Hospital.
Surrey Memorial Hospital’s critical care tower officially opened this month, expanding the hospital’s teaching space for medical students and medical residents.
Surrey Memorial is one of 11 Clinical Academic Campuses of the Faculty of Medicine, and one of two (along with Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster) in the Fraser Health region. The eight-story tower includes a simulation lab with life-like mannequins to practice clinical skills and teamwork, on-call rooms (spaces for students and residents to sleep or study when not tending to patients), clinical teaching rooms (fully-equipped examination rooms that allow students and residents to interact with patients and their instructors without interruption from other hospital activities), a conference room and a 125-seat lecture theatre.
The tower, part of the hospital’s $512-million redevelopment and expansion, creates an additional 151 beds for Surrey Memorial, increasing the in-patient capacity by 30 per cent, and adds an additional 650 direct care staff and over 300 clinical support staff.
The tower will double the capacity of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for high-risk babies and includes B.C.’s first Ronald McDonald Family Room where parents can take a break while being just steps away from their child in hospital. The tower also has expanded stroke and intensive care units, an expanded hospital laboratory that uses new robotics and automated technology, and a new neonatal and paediatric pharmacy right in the NICU — the first of its kind in Canada.
“Thanks to this new facility, health-care professionals will be able to deliver the best-possible care for families in a larger, modern environment with more beds, space, equipment and staff,” said the Hon. Terry Lake, B.C.’s Minister of Health. “The critical care tower will go a long way in meeting the health-care needs of the rapidly growing Fraser Valley.”
In October 2013, Fraser Health, together with the Government of B.C., officially opened Surrey Memorial’s new emergency department, Canada’s second-largest and the province’s busiest, with more than 117,000 visits last year, an increase of more than 17% from the previous year.