Ballooning Alberta ER waiting room ‘fairly regular’ and ‘very annoying’

A late afternoon visit to the emergency department at Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital turned out to be an all-night affair for Alberta mother Karen Khurshed. Sadly, she’s not alone.

“My son had a cold and the flu and started throwing up blood, so I thought this was a very urgent situation,” said Khurshed.

“He has asthma. Yeah that’s what we need to see. ”

Around 5pm on a Tuesday, she took her two-year-old boy to Stollery. The only standing room was the emergency department.

“I’m in this waiting room feeling the stress from the parents, I think so, but I feel the stress from everybody. And these kids are going to sleep on their laps and everybody’s “I’m coughing,” she said.

Khurshed recalls being relieved to wait in the foyer, away from the overcrowded waiting room with children and parents looking to unwind and rest.

“I’m like, ‘Is it because I’m stressed, or is it because everyone is stressed, and I’m everyone’s stressed?’ and kept walking up and down the waiting room, eating snacks and saying, “Yeah, we’re all very stressed.”

Before heading to the hospital, Khurshed checked estimated wait times on the Alberta Health Services website. For Stollery she was 6 hours.

“We actually sat on the bench in the foyer and stayed there all night. We had to wait a total of 13 hours for the doctor to come,” says Khurshed.

The fall saw high absenteeism in schools in Edmonton and Calgary. An epidemic of respiratory illnesses has broken out in many schools, and parents have expressed concern to Global News that classrooms are nearly empty as more children fall ill.

An increase in respiratory illnesses has led to longer wait times at children’s hospitals in Alberta.

An AHS spokesperson said Calgary’s Alberta Children’s Hospital (ACH) had more than 300 emergency room visits each day, compared with about 180 to 220 before the recent surge.

Pediatric ICUs at Stollery and ACH neared 100% in mid-November.

Dr. Sandy Donne, a 20-year emergency medicine veteran in Edmonton, said the wait time the Crusheds experienced was not surprising given the current reality.

Don said he had more “OMG” moments at work.

“These OMG moments are when the waiting room is inflated. Unfortunately, it happens quite often,” he said.

ER doctors said having people waiting with undiagnosed problems is the place with the greatest risk in the emergency system.

“They were evaluated by a triage (nurse), had a cursory exam, some questions, and had vital signs. But you don’t really know what the diagnosis is,” Don said. He said, “You can’t give a decent assessment from the waiting room.

“The longer people wait there, the more likely something bad will happen.”

frustration on the front line

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A paramedic in Edmonton thinks people in Alberta don’t realize how dire the medical situation has become, despite circulating news stories.

“When people call 911, they expect[an ambulance]to come right away.

The paramedic spoke to Global News on condition of anonymity.

He said the long wait times for ambulances have led many paramedics to advise families to go to hospitals in other ways.

“If you can throw them in the back seat of a car and get them to the hospital in 10 minutes, it might be better than waiting because if it’s very likely, it’s very unreliable at the moment. because,” he explained.

A longtime paramedic, he remembers when dispatches to Edmonton’s bedroom communities, such as Sherwood Park and St. Albert, 10 miles away, felt insane. Recently he is dispatched to Jasper, his 365-kilometer drive.

Responding to emergency calls, paramedics said they were thinking of ways to soften the blow of a delayed response.

“Most of the time, it crosses my mind that I’m preparing to be part of something really bad. I’m trying to figure out how to answer when my family asks, ‘Why is it so long?'”

The Emergency Communications Officer (ECO) also spoke to Global News on condition of anonymity due to job security concerns.

ECOs, commonly known as 911 operators, are responsible for answering 911 calls, connecting dispatchers, and providing telephone assistance to people in Alberta.

Speaking to Global News, ECO has been in her role with Alberta Health Services for over a decade. She said her call volume had increased exponentially.

“Our call volume has increased so much that we can’t get any further. We are miserably behind and it sucks,” she said. Or I’ve seen calls that have been on hold for over seven hours, a long time waiting for an ambulance.”

The operator explained AHS’s triage protocol during particularly busy times. “Emergency Disconnect” means that the call will be accepted but may need to be disconnected. I have been told to call back if there is any change in my health.

“Calling someone back to say a patient has gotten worse is terrible when they’ve been waiting for an hour and a half and suddenly the patient isn’t feeling well,” she explained. At that point, it may be necessary to give CPR or other palliative instructions.

“If the ambulance had come, I wouldn’t have had to, and it’s a terrible feeling.

“It’s hard to tell people when you call 911 that an ambulance won’t come,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Until last year or 18 months, I had never done it. Now it seems I do it regularly.”

Both frontline responders spoke of their dissatisfaction with staff levels and said morale was very low.

“Sometimes I go home and think, ‘I didn’t do anything today,’ or, ‘Do I really want to keep doing this,'” she said. “I know it’s the right job for me. I enjoy helping people…I took another step forward for the next day.”

“Personally, I don’t need to know the exact result. I know I did my best when I called 911.”

ECO assumes that people died while waiting for treatment.

“In no uncertain terms, this is the worst I’ve seen in 20 years.”

“Every way we could see[healthcare]every way we could measure it. It’s never been this bad,” paramedics said.

“It’s been said that the biggest stress at work is not being able to complete the tasks asked of you, and certainly that’s what we see,” Don said.

“The high volume of requests – the inability to reach those who come to the emergency department in a timely manner – we do the best we can with resource constraints, minimal or staffing constraints. There is also the moral pain of not being able to provide care.”

An Edmonton-based doctor saw his colleagues in the emergency department visibly upset.

“It also affects us because they can’t provide care. So morale is low,” Dong said. “It’s hard to see your colleagues pushing their limits.”

In the end, 2-year-old Malix Khurshed was seen by a doctor and “was fine,” said her mother, Karen.

“Good. The staff were lovely. But how difficult access to health care has been for him is really a serious problem.”