A cyclist rides across the new crosswalk at Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton in 2022. Alberta is looking into the death of a man who was brought by ambulance to the hospital's ER.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Alberta is investigating after a man died while waiting six hours for care in an Edmonton emergency department, reigniting calls for the government to address severe overcrowding in hospitals.
Paul Parks, president-elect of the emergency physicians section of the Alberta Medical Association, said members and other health care workers confirmed that the patient was brought to the Royal Alexandra Hospital by ambulance the evening of May 8.
Dr. Parks said the man was high acuity and required quick intervention. But the ED was so overcrowded that he was offloaded into a waiting room. Staff checked on him periodically, but in the early hours of May 9, he was found deceased.
The name and age of the patient have not been disclosed.
“Our major emergency departments across Canada are struggling in many ways, but Alberta seems to be struggling a lot worse,” said Dr. Parks, himself an emergency medicine physician in Medicine Hat.
“Repeated waiting room deaths and near-misses keep happening more and more and more because of the severe strain we’re under.”
In January, Edmonton physicians called on the province to declare a formal emergency because the city’s major hospitals had run out of room to safely accept patients. The call came after the much-publicized death of Prashant Sreekumar, who died on Dec. 22 after eight hours in the Grey Nuns Community Hospital ED.
Also in January, The Globe and Mail reported that government officials were sent a document that detailed six preventable deaths in Alberta hospitals that occurred during the first two weeks of the year. It also highlighted 30 close calls, where high-stakes diagnoses were delayed because of severe overcrowding.
The government, at the time, acknowledged hospitals were under “extreme pressure” and pointed to influenza season as the major contributor. But physicians stressed that pressure on hospitals was a symptom of other issues, including rapid population growth, underfunding of the health system, and an older, medically complex population.
Alberta Health Services, which oversees most hospitals in the province, said in a statement on Friday that it has undertaken an investigation into the recent fatality and the medical examiner has reviewed the case.
“AHS takes situations like this seriously and is committed to providing a safe environment that supports high-quality care,” said Kristen Anderson, a spokesperson with Alberta Health Services. “Out of respect for patient and their family’s privacy, we are not able to share further details at this time.”
Acute Care Alberta, a provincial health agency, will conduct a quality assurance review, which can result in recommendations to improve emergency care.
A review of this kind into Mr. Sreekumar’s case resulted in 16 recommendations, including an increase in staffing and expanding the Grey Nuns ED. All were accepted by the government, but Dr. Parks said “nobody is aware of what has been done to act on those.”
The office of Matt Jones, Alberta’s Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services, did not respond to a request for comment.
Dr. Parks said he was told the patient had received treatment for a possible overdose. He has not reviewed the patient file, but said overdose patients must be monitored closely because they are at high risk of relapsing into a life-threatening state.
The recent death reminded him of a case included in the January document to Alberta officials. That anonymized patient was brought in by ambulance with a portable oxygen tank. They waited in an overflow space for three hours without care and ran out of oxygen. They later required ventilation and went to intensive care.
It is unclear if they survived.
Dr. Parks said health care workers are working to provide the best possible care to patients day in and day out but are being set up to fail.
“They’re set up to see these things happen – this suffering, these really tragic cases – and they’re burning out. They’re leaving,” he said.
“We’re going to have a vicious cycle where, at some point, if government doesn’t act on this, we might find that we can’t staff our EDs because the teams just can’t take these kinds of endless, really challenging, frustrating circumstances.”