About 35 patients were stuck in Red Deer’s emergency department beds waiting to access a hospital ward for surgery or treatment on Tuesday morning.
Dr. Paul Parks, president-elect of the section of emergency medicine with the Alberta Medical Association (AMA), said Red Deer emergency doctors are routinely squeezed, unable to move patients into higher levels of care either at Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre or another hospital.
In recent weeks, Edmonton Zone hospitals have been overcrowded and unable to help, which is where Red Deer patients are typically sent, said Parks, who checked on the capacity in Red Deer’s emergency department on Jan.13.
“(Red Deer emergency doctors) were literally faced with all the emergency departments and hospitals in Edmonton saying — ‘no, we can’t take them’,” Parks said.
He added that patients may stay for days in Red Deer emergency beds and also face specialty consultation delays.
“Red Deer is really struggling with far too many admitted inpatients stranded in their emerg department that they are having trouble safely seeing patients in the waiting room day in and day out as well.”
Parks said Alberta has been in a “state of crisis/disaster/emergency” with doctors around the province waiting for the provincial government to coordinate load-leveling measures. In the past, Alberta Health Services (AHS) was the coordinating body and would have already implemented many measures.
On Monday, Acute Care Alberta (ACA) CEO David Diamond, said ACA is coordinating a provincewide response that has seen all sectors of the healthcare system cooperate to create capacity and free up resources during this challenging respiratory virus season.
“(ACA) is working with service providers like AHS and Covenant Health to support site-level decisions such as accelerating discharges and transfers where appropriate, limiting non-essential inbound transfers, dedicating 336 beds specifically for respiratory virus season, and opening designated surge spaces to manage increased demand,” said Diamond in a statement.
“While respiratory virus hospital admissions peaked on Dec. 28, emergency departments across the province have seen a higher volume of non-respiratory virus patients that require hospitalization, which has resulted in sustained pressure on many of the province’s larger hospitals. To address this, ACA is working closely with individual sites across the province to review daily surgical slates which has resulted in the rescheduling of a total of only seven non-urgent surgeries across the province since Jan. 1.”
A statement from AHS said Red Deer hospital continues to see an increase in patient demand in its emergency department.
“This includes high volumes of patients seeking care due to respiratory illnesses, but also high numbers of seriously ill and injured patients who require significant attention from our frontline staff, including physicians and nurses. This can lead to longer wait times for patients with less serious health problems,” said AHS.
“If patients require more specialized care, we work with care teams at larger sites in Edmonton and Calgary to transfer patients as appropriate to their care needs. Such collaborative efforts and processes have not changed.”
AHS said the hospital, which has 57 patients spaces (beds, treatment chairs) in its emergency department, is using several measures to support patient flow and manage volumes, including utilizing dedicated surge and overcapacity beds, discharging appropriate patients early with enhanced home supports, augmenting staffing when necessary, and working with RAAPID and Emergency Health Services to return patients who no longer need specialized care to other health facilities when medically appropriate.
At this time, the hospital has capacity in the established overcapacity and surge spaces, AHS said.
Parks said in November 2023, the AMA put forward an acute care stabilization plan, which the government unfortunately didn’t act on. Pressure on the system continued to increase, then government was faced with the very public death of a 44-year-old man in the waiting room at Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton last month.
“But we’ve been telling them we know of numerous really bad outcomes and deaths that have been happening across the province because of severe overcrowding and begging them to act.
“Basically, they spent the last couple of years dismantling the acute care system, in the sense of breaking it into many, many pieces, fragmenting it, disintegrating it. That’s where all their energy was spent,” Parks said.
AMA president Brian Wirzba said the acute care system has been operating at over 110 per cent capacity for more than a year, and wait times for urgent patients in Alberta’s major cities has increased by 70 per cent since late 2022.
“Our acute care system is not well,” said Wirzba, in a statement.
“Physician leaders have been sounding the alarm about the chaos in our emergency departments and the resulting risks to patient care.”
Sarah Hoffman, Alberta’s New Democrat Shadow Minister for Hospital and Surgical Health Facilities, said Albertans need an update from the government on the plan to ease wait times and overcrowding.
“The peak of this current flu outbreak may be behind us, but Alberta’s health care system and our hospitals are still in crisis. Overcrowding and long wait times for care didn’t start with respiratory viruses, and it won’t end without new actions being taken,” Hoffman said.