Skip to content

Median wait at Sturgeon 19.7 hours

A local physician said he's not surprised that patients requiring treatment in the emergency department at St. Albert's Sturgeon Community Hospital waited a median average of 19.

A local physician said he's not surprised that patients requiring treatment in the emergency department at St. Albert's Sturgeon Community Hospital waited a median average of 19.7 hours before being admitted for treatment, according to a third quarter report from Alberta Health Services.

Sturgeon had the second longest wait times in the province, according to the report.

"The stats are not surprising. We've had some significant challenges there for quite a while," said Dr. Darryl LaBuick, a family physician at the Grandin Medical Clinic, who also sees patients at Sturgeon.

The median average means that half of patients waited longer while the other half were admitted sooner.

"I talk to my emergency physician colleagues quite a bit and they've expressed great levels of frustration over the wait times and our back-up in emergency and the number of in-patients we have being managed in emergency, which is not good," LaBuick said.

The information confirms what an Alberta Medical Association doctor, Paul Parks, outlined in a letter he sent to Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky, Premier Ed Stelmach and Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett warning of a potential collapse of emergency care for patients if action wasn't taken soon.

In the letter, Parks, who is the AMA's section president of emergency medicine, said overcrowding in Alberta hospitals is the worst it has ever been.

Patients continue to suffer and receive substandard emergency care because of lack of capacity within the system, he wrote.

"Despite acknowledgment and agreement regarding the severity of the crisis, the situation continues to degrade," Parks wrote.

He indicated more than 50 per cent of emergency beds in big-city hospitals are filled with seniors and those awaiting transfer to other hospital wards, causing a huge backlog in waiting rooms.

In the letter, Parks called for immediate action that included moving seniors into hallways and empty wards while they await long-term care beds and moving admitted patients out of emergency and into other hospital wards.

LaBuick said inappropriate admissions to hospitals, especially those which could be managed elsewhere, are part of the problem.

"The biggest thing is our nursing home requirements. We need to make sure that we have appropriate nursing home availability for our seniors, which is still our biggest neglected population — our seniors population for health care," he said.

"Certainly, with our population that's aging, and we have the baby boomers that are now entering into that retirement age, we're going to see a huge surge of homecare, long-term care requirements over the next 10 to 30 years."

In addition, he said opening several hundred hospital beds in Edmonton over the next few years, something AHS said it has committed to, is only part of the equation.

"You can open as many hospital beds as you like but you have to make sure that you have the nurses and the physicians that are able to staff those beds. Also, they're still missing the point that we need to have the long-term care facilities. That's what we need and we need good nursing resources in those facilities," he explained.

"That's a critical part that they're missing."

On Monday, Conservative MLAs voted against holding an emergency debate on the state of health care.

Zwozdesky told the Edmonton Journal the crisis in emergency rooms in Alberta did not meet the definition of the word "urgent."

LaBuick questioned what would be solved by having such a debate.

"There is no reason for a debate, we know what the problem is so debating is not going to solve anything. The big thing is developing policy and developing a plan that will help resolve these issues," LaBuick said.

"We in Alberta probably spend more per capita or more per patient from a budgeting health care point of view than any of the other provinces but we've still got some significant challenges so what are we doing?"

Wildrose releases ER 'horror stories'

Similar stories emerged from the Wildrose Alliance on Monday, when the party released documents detailing hundreds of emergency room horror stories dating back to January, 2008, including pregnant women getting cervical exams in open triage area, and patients waiting hours to see a physician, some with life threatening injuries.

The documents contain 322 cases in which patients requiring urgent and immediate care were forced to wait in emergency rooms across the province.

"If you didn't know better, you'd think you were reading about a developing country," said party leader, Danielle Smith, in a statement.

"There is no way Albertans should have to put up with this kind of care when we are spending more money on health care than almost every other province."

Zwozdesky was expected to meet with Parks on Tuesday to discuss the state of emergency rooms in Alberta.

push icon
Be the first to read breaking stories. Enable push notifications on your device. Disable anytime.
No thanks