Fraser Health is B.C.’s biggest health region and oversees 10 acute care hospitals from Burnaby to Hope.

It’s one of the fastest-growing health regions in Canada, serving 1.5 million people.

It’s also a massive organization, with an annual budget of $2.4 billion, with more than 23,000 employees, 2,300 physicians and nearly 5,000 volunteers.

Surrey, with a population growing by 1,000 residents a month and on track to eclipse Vancouver in size in the decades ahead, is a major focus for service and planning.

A new Surrey Outpatient Hospital to handle most day surgery is now under construction and a vastly expanded emergency department coupled with a critical care tower is to begin construction next year to reduce current congestion and meet future demand.

“By 2014, we will have invested nearly $800 million of capital in Surrey,” Fraser Health CEO Nigel Murray said of the expansion plans.

With the work come jobs.

Several thousand construction jobs as well as permanent employment will come with the new Surrey Outpatient Hospital and the new ER and critical care tower expansion at Surrey Memorial Hospital (SMH) itself.

It may have opened 50 years ago with just 100 beds, but SMH has grown exponentially – along with the surrounding community – to become the largest hospital in the region.

Since opening its doors in 1959, SMH has gone from serving a population of 75,000 to more than 600,000 people.

SMH ranks as the second-largest hospital in B.C. (second only to Vancouver General Hospital), but remains the largest hospital of the 13 in the Fraser Health region. SMH has the busiest emergency department in the province with 77,000 ER visits a year.

The hospital now has nearly 500 beds and employs about 4,000 people, including more than 1,600 nurses.

Interns and residents from across Canada, North America and abroad come to SMH to learn – and often, lured by state-of-the-art facilities and equipment, choose to begin and expand their careers at the hospital.

The hospital boasts the biggest single-room maternity unit in B.C. and a 10-bed adolescent psychiatry inpatient unit – the first of its kind in the Fraser Valley.

As SMH has grown, it has also evolved to meet specialized needs in the region and serves as a regional referral centre for several programs, including pediatrics, cancer care, surgical care, renal care, palliative and sleep lab. It’s also a main provincial centre for specialties like thoracic, plastic and retinal surgery, as well as neonatal care.

And the expansion of services continues. In addition to the new critical care tower and much-expanded ER (including a Children’s ER), a neonatal intensive care unit twice the size of the current facility, 85 new inpatient beds and academic space to support SMH’s important role as a teaching hospital are also on the way.

Already, Fraser Health is the second-largest employer in the City of Surrey, with 4,100 active employees here and 350 active physicians.

Recruitment remains a major priority going forward.

“By 2015 we need something like 400 more physicians in Fraser Health and some of those need to go to Surrey,” Murray said.

Innovative methods of partnering with medical schools to attract residents and interns are under consideration.

Besides acute care hospitals, Fraser also presides over primary health care services, which is to be increasingly important in promoting better health to prevent chronic disease.

It also runs various community home care services and mental health and addictions programs.

Click here to view index of other stories in the Leader's Surrey in Focus: Health special edition.