Earlier this morning, Surrey mayoral candidate Doug McCallum claimed that he was making an announcement that would \u201cchange the direction of the Surrey municipal election.\u201d<\/p>\n
He announced that if he is elected as Surrey\u2019s mayor, he would build a new full-service hospital for Surrey on City-owned land at 6965 King George Boulevard in Newton.<\/p>\n
Surrey purchased this land in Oct. 2020.<\/p>\n
McCallum\u2019s party, the Safe Surrey Coalition, said in a press release that they will fast-track the application and issue all City permits within 60 days, then go to both the provincial and federal governments for construction funding.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe disparity Surrey lives with is not a matter of opinion; it is arithmetic. Vancouver and Surrey have roughly the same population, about 730,000 people each. Vancouver has six hospitals. Surrey has one,\u201d reads the press release.<\/p>\n
\u201cSame population, six hospitals there, one hospital here. How is that fair to Surrey?\u201d said McCallum in the release. \u201cVancouver has a general hospital, a children\u2019s hospital, a women\u2019s hospital, a trauma centre, specialty care for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
The release noted that Fraser Health, the health authority that Surrey falls under, does not have a pediatric intensive care unit, and that between 900 and 1,000 critically ill children are transferred from Surrey to the BC Children\u2019s Hospital in Vancouver every year.<\/p>\n
It also added that Surrey\u2019s current hospital, Surrey Memorial, treats 50,000 children a year, even though its pediatric emergency department is designed to treat 20,000 a year. It also delivers 6,000 babies a year, with a capacity for 5,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cSurrey has been treated as a second-class city for as long as I can remember, and we are done accepting it,\u201d McCallum said, adding that it is on the trajectory to become B.C.\u2019s most populated city<\/a>.<\/p>\n McCallum said that the Surrey General Hospital would be a full-service acute care facility, with an emergency department, acute care and inpatient beds, operating rooms, intensive care, maternity and newborn care, diagnostics and imaging, and dedicated pediatric care.<\/p>\n The City of Surrey has already stepped into healthcare<\/p>\n Earlier this year, the City of Surrey confirmed locations and lease agreements with two new community medical clinics<\/a>, which are expected to open this fall.<\/p>\n While the City will not be involved in medical decision-making, this is a step outside municipal government\u2019s responsibility, as healthcare typically falls under the provincial government\u2019s jurisdiction.<\/p>\n \u201cThese first two clinics are a concrete step toward making sure more Surrey residents can see a family doctor when they need one,\u201d said Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke at the time of the announcement in March 2026.<\/p>\n The provincial government is also currently in the process of building Surrey\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0second hospital \u2014 the new Cloverdale hospital \u2014 at a cost of $2.9 billion<\/a>. When it opens in 2030, it will have 168 beds, including medical\/surgical beds, high acuity beds and medical oncology beds, and an emergency department with 55 treatment spaces. There will be surgical units, outpatient clinics, and a BC Cancer Centre facility.<\/p>\n There are also longer-term plans to build another acute care tower at Surrey Memorial Hospital.<\/p>\n Alongside Doug McCallum (who was previously Surrey\u2019s mayor before he was defeated by Locke in 2022), Brenda Locke, Linda Annis<\/a>, and Mike Starchuk<\/a> are some of the major contenders for mayor.<\/p>\n Voting day is on Oct. 17.<\/p>\n With files from Kenneth Chan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this morning, Surrey mayoral candidate Doug McCallum claimed that he was making an announcement that would \u201cchange…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,87674],"class_list":["post-904564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}