Warning calls are coming from emergency room doctors across Alberta who are telling the province that patients are at risk due to hospital overcrowding and too few resources. Dr. Darryl F. Stewart of Sturgeon hospital and Dr.
Warning calls are coming from emergency room doctors across Alberta who are telling the province that patients are at risk due to hospital overcrowding and too few resources.
Dr. Darryl F. Stewart of Sturgeon hospital and Dr. Jarrod Anderson of Edmonton's Misericordia Hospital are among the latest voices calling for improvements to emergency wait times and suggesting without them people might die before ever seeing a hospital bed.
They share horror stories of patients spending hours in waiting rooms with conditions ranging from chest pain – one man had a heart attack after a three-hour wait for a bed – to obstructed bowels, to a woman being sent from the waiting room directly to surgery for a ruptured etopic pregnancy.
Backlogged emergency rooms cause other problems that put people in jeopardy. Ambulance response times begin to climb as responders are forced to wait at the hospital until their charges receive care.
City Coun. Cathy Herron highlighted that problem at the end of January when she went on a ride along with a St. Albert ambulance. She tweeted the experience and much of what she said was concerning.
Ambulances waiting at hospitals for lengthy periods of times as the responders wait for their charges to be handed over; her St. Albert-based unit attended to calls in Morinville and Spruce Grove; she also tweeted a concerning moment when there were no ambulances available because they were tied up at the hospital.
Fire chief Ray Richards said the day Heron did her ride along, St. Albert was at code red – meaning no ambulances were available in the city – seven times. He said it usually happens about three to four times a day. That has city council petitioning for another ambulance to be added to the city.
Unfortunately, solutions are not simple and we have reached a situation where no one plan will fix the problem. Alberta needs more continuing care spaces to free up beds for emergency patients. While plans are in place to add continuing care beds, that plan has been criticized for not being enough to meet the actual needs. Stewart and Anderson also said more nurses are needed to help triage patients faster. St. Albert's desire for a third ambulance would also help, but does not do a lot of good if it merely means another unit sitting in the hospital parking lot.
Emergencies are just that and time is of the essence. It is unacceptable to have circumstances where people are unable to receive proper care or ambulances are unable to respond because hospitals do not have the resources to see patients in a timely fashion.
This is a serious problem and one that needs immediate attention before we see long waits turn into more deaths. The first step is for Alberta Health Services to stop downplaying the severity of the problem. When doctors begin to say they worry their patients will die in the emergency room, slowly addressing the issue is no longer an option. The time to act is now.
