Michelle Gamage, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Tyee

After a year of research, which included eight freedom of information requests, dozens of email chains and two appeals to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, The Tyee still doesn’t know how many British Columbians are overdosing in hospitals across the province.

We’ve lost our final appeal with the OIPC, which means all we have to show for a year’s worth of investigation is data from Fraser Health, the only health authority that responded to our freedom of information request by providing data.

It’s not entirely clear why we couldn’t access this data from the other six health authorities. The Tyee was often given conflicting reasons why the data couldn’t be accessible to the public.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry previously told The Tyee it is difficult to track what happens to patients in hospitals and that the health authorities had not been directed to track when patients overdosed on illicit, unregulated drugs while under hospital care.

That doesn’t sit well with Dr. Jessica Wilder, a family and addiction medicine physician and co-founder of Doctors for Safer Drug Policy, an independent group of physicians who care for people who use substances, advocating for compassionate and evidence-based health-care policies.

In November 2024 Doctors for Safer Drug Policy started opening unsanctioned overdose prevention sites near Nanaimo and Victoria hospitals so patients who use drugs could be supervised and have someone intervene in the event of a medical emergency, such as an overdose.

Wilder and other members of Doctors for Safer Drug Policy said their patients needed these services and called on health authorities to open their own overdose prevention sites within hospitals. Without these sites, the doctors said, people were hiding their unregulated drug use, which increased their risk of an overdose becoming fatal, or leaving hospital care early to use unregulated drugs.

At the time, Island Health said these sites were not necessary and patients were being cared for by addiction medicine teams.

Then in June 2025, the provincial government said it would be opening more overdose preventions sites in hospitals across B.C.

The Tyee wanted to know more about how many people were overdosing and in which hospitals, so on June 30, 2025, we filed freedom of information requests with the seven health authorities that oversee hospitals, asking how many patients in each hospital had a fatal or non-fatal overdose over the last five years, and when and where overdose prevention sites were opened.

Fast forward to one year later, and only Fraser Health released its data, revealing that hundreds of patients were overdosing at Surrey Memorial Hospital every year.

The BC Coroners Service was able to confirm that fatal overdoses in hospitals are relatively rare, but still happen. There can be roughly one to two fatal overdoses at a given major hospital per year.

Wilder said she feels “disappointed” but is also “not surprised” that the health authorities have found ways to not release the data.

“The response from our health authorities to this drug crisis — that has been the biggest public health crisis that has faced Canadians and British Columbians in our history — has been anemic at best and potentially furthering harms at worst, so it doesn’t surprise me to hear they’re continuing to avoid talking about this difficult subject,” she told The Tyee.

More than 19,077 British Columbians have been killed by the unregulated toxic drug supply since B.C. declared a public health emergency more than 10 years ago, according to the BC Coroners Service.

In the first four months of 2026 alone, which is the most recent data available, 522 people were killed by the unregulated supply.

Wilder knows patients are overdosing in hospitals because at least one patient per week who is being looked after by the Vancouver Island addiction medicine team she works with, overdoses.

Not all people who use drugs will let health care workers know, so it’s possible the team is missing people and the number is even higher, she added.

Addiction is a heavily stigmatized medical illness, and that stigma is hurting people who are trying to access medical care, Wilder said.

Hospitals prohibit unregulated drug use, which makes things complicated when someone who uses drugs needs hospital care.

Ideally, when a patient who uses drugs is admitted to hospital, a team of addiction medicine specialists are able to replace the unregulated drugs they are using with pharmaceutical-grade, regulated drugs provided by the hospital, Wilder said.

The problem is that people are addicted to an unregulated supply of opioids that is so potent and so contaminated with other drugs, such as benzodiazepines, that doctors are not actually able to replace the drugs a person’s body is addicted to, Wilder said.

What medications doctors have access to “pales” in comparison to the potency of the unregulated supply, she added.

Addiction medicine teams are “constantly struggling to meet people’s opioid tolerance” to manage patient’s pain, prevent them from going into withdrawal or not have a patient continue to access the unregulated drug supply, Wilder continued.

People who try to quit using benzodiazepines cold turkey can experience seizures and potentially die, she added.

When hospitals open overdose prevention sites, it helps build a relationship with a patient by acknowledging that they use drugs and those drugs may be harmful, she said, which allows for more trust and honesty between patients and hospital staff.

“They can be open about the things they’re struggling with, if their pain isn’t being managed appropriately,” Wilder said. This helps keep people in hospital to complete their treatment, and reduces other patients and staff’s potential exposure to unregulated drugs.

When people leave hospital care early, they are not getting better in their own, Wilder said. Instead, they are coming back to emergency department in a worse state than they originally presented. For example, an infection may have worsened and may now requires amputation, which will require specialized surgeons, infectious disease specialists, physiotherapists and extensive rehabilitation.

Overdose prevention sites can save taxpayers “exponential” amounts of money, not to mention enormous amounts of human suffering, she said.

The reasons health authorities gave for denying FOI requests

Fraser Health was the only health authority to give The Tyee the exact data we were looking for. The data showed that there were 6,280 non-fatal unregulated drug events across 12 hospitals in Fraser Health from 2020 to 2025. Hundreds of patients per year experienced non-fatal overdoses at Surrey Memorial Hospital alone.

Fraser Health has overdose prevention services at Surrey Memorial Hospital, the Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre campus, Langley Memorial Hospital, Peace Arch Hospital, Ridge Meadows Hospital and Chilliwack General Hospital, according to Dr. Rahul Walia, medical health officer for Fraser Health.

Interior Health told The Tyee it would not release the data because the amalgamated non-fatal overdose numbers, reported per-hospital, per-year, would unreasonably violate patient privacy.

The Tyee appealed this denial with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, where an investigator confirmed “the information exists in the format you requested,” but that it couldn’t be released because it could identify patients if combined with “other publicly available or known information,” especially in smaller communities.

So The Tyee re-filed an amended FOI, asking for data on the number of non-fatal overdoses in Interior Health’s hospitals, with only hospitals with 20 or more non-fatal overdoses included.

Interior Health responded to the second FOI by saying it didn’t have the data.

“Information of this nature is not tracked within standard reporting mechanisms, and aggregated data is not available,” it said.

Island Health confirmed they were looking into a response, but never formally gave one, despite being legislated to do so under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

PHSA and Providence Health released data that did not distinguish between how many people overdosed in community and were brought to hospital with how many people overdosed while a hospital patient, and therefore the data didn’t offer any insights into the need for overdose prevention sites in their hospitals.

Northern Health confirmed they were looking into a response, but never formally gave one.

Vancouver Coastal Health said data on in-hospital overdoses was reported in its Patient Safety and Learning System, which cannot be accessed through a freedom of information request.

This system is a used to report “patient safety incidents, near misses and hazards” and is used to “identify trends, improve care and support learning across departments,” Martina Gimenez, a freedom of information advisor in VCH’s freedom of information office, told The Tyee.

She also said providing aggregated data would be an unreasonable invasion of patient privacy, especially in smaller communities.

The Tyee once again appealed to the OIPC. Shannon Hodge, a senior investigator with the office, confirmed the Patient Safety and Learning System was protected from freedom of information requests. VCH said it could technically manually comb through “thousands” of patient records over the past five years in all 12 of its hospitals, but that was requesting an unreasonable amount of work.

Hodge agreed the request would create an unreasonable amount of work, noting that the data requested “is actually not available in Cerner in any consistent way.” Cerner is the program VCH uses for its electronic health records.

In an email, the Health Ministry said health authorities haven’t been directed to collect hospital overdose data because the data can already be collected and reviewed through the Patient Safety Learning System, which every health authority has.

It’s important for Patient Safety and Learning Systems to be protected from public scrutiny so health care professionals can have “full, open and candid discussions” to improve patient safety, it added.

Health authorities and hospitals are assessed for national quality and safety standards by Accreditation Canada, it added, and each health authority’s accreditation status gets posted on its website.

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