Vancouver hospital should 'never' be diverting pregnant patients, says trauma surgeon

Pregnant patients requiring emergency or specialist care are being diverted from Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) due to a lack of on-call obstetricians.

Dr. Philip Dawe, a trauma surgeon and medical director of VGH Trauma Services, says he and others have been told not to treat patients who are 20 or more weeks pregnant, and they're not happy about it.

“In trauma, seconds matter … we should never be talking about diversion because VGH is the trauma centre for Vancouver acute [care],” he says.

“There's a horrific distress among clinicians about this,” he says.

While babies are normally delivered at other designated hospitals in the Lower Mainland — such as B.C. Women’s Hospital — Dawe explains that in certain emergency situations, a pregnant person undergoing treatment at VGH may need a caesarean section.

The hospital has normally had obstetricians on call for that, but it is no longer the case, he says.

“It's a very rare event that somehow, this patient getting treatment for something else, goes into labour,” Dawe adds.

Dawe gave an example of how the new restriction could play out in his work as a trauma surgeon.

If a woman who