Alberta’s emergency room physicians are sounding the alarm on dangerous conditions for patient safety. They have discovered a harmful catalog of cases that show the risks and consequences of longer waits for medical treatment. Dr. Paul Parks, an ER doc in Medicine Hat and former president of the AMA, stepped up. He put together an extremely sobering report that outlines 27 examples of individuals in unmanageable pain and anguish as a result of waiting to be treated. This report was presented to provincial government and health officials on January 11. It points to six of these preventable deaths, which all tragically fell within a two-week period from late December to early January.
Dr. Parks noted that these cases are more than just individual tragedies. They further reinforce systemic challenges in the healthcare structure as a whole. He chronicled how emergency physicians across Alberta began documenting cases of patient injury stemming from wait times in accessing treatment. This shift followed the sudden death of a 44-year-old man while waiting for treatment in the emergency room at the Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton.
Details of the Report
Throughout the report, we focus on a few particularly troubling examples. Another is the case of a middle-aged man who experienced severe chest pain and spent eight hours in the emergency department before receiving an appropriate bed. In the second case, a 50-year-old woman experienced a torn aorta. This injury resulted in an excruciating wait for emergency surgery, endangering her life.
It’s a heartbreaking yet necessary reminder of what happens when we let delays in emergency care become deadly. Dr. Parks was particularly worried about the impact on the quality of care patients would receive.
- A man in his 50s who succumbed to multi-organ failure caused by a bacterial blood infection after enduring a lengthy wait for care.
- A patient with a ruptured spleen who was left unattended for over four hours.
- A woman experiencing a stroke who spent four hours confused in a wheelchair.
- A man in his 70s who suffered a major heart attack while waiting for two hours without an available bed.
- A young man in his 20s with influenza who developed pneumonia and crashed after waiting seven hours, leading to organ failure and an intensive care unit admission.
He added that another patient “likely will have long-term cardiac damage due to delays, could have died in the [waiting room].”
“Still uncertain if he will survive ICU care,” – Dr. Paul Parks
In this discussion, emergency physician Dr. Scott MacLean issued an important challenge. He thinks that Dr. Parks’ report seriously undercounts the number of patients who experience excessively long wait times in the ER. He called attention to the fact that millions of people could be suffering from adverse health effects. These issues are never truly recorded since they don’t have a real-time immediate fix.
Concerns from Emergency Physicians
The AMA focuses on an especially pernicious problem: essential health care services that are inpatient hospital discharge friendly are not open on Saturdays and Sundays. This closure contributes to an untenable backlog of patients in emergency departments. This problem adds even more hurdles to patients trying to get timely medical interventions.
At the press conference, Warner emphasized that the provincial government understands just how dire these conditions are. They are in earnest on a host of long-term solutions to massively increase capacity within the healthcare system.
“We take all information related to patient outcomes seriously,” – Kyle Warner
The ongoing, volatile crisis inside Alberta’s emergency rooms brings into focus the most important questions concerning emergent systemic failures in healthcare delivery. Physicians have been attempting to point out the role of individual health conditions in the preventability of deaths. They think most of these deaths result directly from failures in our health care system.
The Broader Context
In an email, Jennifer Vanderlaan, spokesperson for the AMA, explained that the picture is much more complicated when it comes to patient outcomes.
This comment exemplifies the continued pushback on alternative strategies for accountability and improvement within Alberta’s healthcare system.
“It is erroneous to suggest that all deaths are rooted in system failure,” – Jennifer Vanderlaan
This remark highlights the ongoing debate over accountability and improvement strategies within Alberta’s healthcare framework.
