SURREY, B.C.—An alarm bell ringing in the hospital corridor makes it hard to think, let alone talk. Down the hall a female patient moans in pain, distracting the social worker momentarily. She turns back to the frail woman speaking softly from a hospital bed in front of her.“But I don’t want to go to Chilliwack,” says 64-year-old Melanie Keays, her voice barely audible.“I know, but you have to work with us,” the social worker replies. “We don’t want to send you out on the street.”It’s mid-November, and Melanie has been in this bed at Surrey Memorial Hospital for 10 days. Hospital staff insist there is nothing physically wrong with her — “unfortunately, she is medically stable,” as the nurses keep saying — but the hospital doesn’t know what to do with her. She has no home, and the shelter she was living in refuses to take her back.She has no bank cards or access to cash. She uses a walker and struggles to climb even small sets of stairs. The pharmacist doesn’t know where to send her methadone prescription once she leaves the hospital.Melanie is in recovery from decades of heroin use, and she requires a lot of support. She forgets critical appointments. She needs in-home care to help her bathe and keep her clothes clean. She is frail, and her health is consistently precarious.Her Surrey-based methadone doctor says she should be in an assisted-living care home. But staff at the hospital want to put her in a taxi to the Salvation Army shelter in Chilliwack, more than 70 kilometres away from her friends, her family and her only supports.Melanie is not the only one. In February, an elderly woman was discharged from Chilliwack General Hospital and dropped off by a taxi at the city’s Ann Davis Transition House. Missing a shoe, and wearing only a hospital gown, within half an hour she was so violently ill that she collapsed in the bathroom and staff sent her back to the ...
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