Doctors in Alberta are seeking more effort from the government toward mounting capacity issues in major centre hospitals.--NEWS FILE PHOTO
zmason@medicinehatnews.com
After three deaths were reported in one day in the emergency room of Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton, physicians are calling from action from the province.
In addition to the widely publicized death of 44-year-old Edmonton father Prashant Sreekumar after waiting in the ER for eight hours on Dec. 22, the Globe and Mail reported Thursday that two others also died while receiving active care in the same ER that day.
Since then, physicians across the province have been sounding the alarm about a crisis in Alberta hospitals.
In a statement to the Globe and Mail, Maddison McKee, press secretary to Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange, said calls for a “state of emergency” are “misguided,” and would “add nothing to what is already being done.”
Medicine Hat emergency physician Dr. Paul Parks says the province’s dismissal of physician concerns may be using semantics as a scapegoat.
“There’s been different terminology used, state of emergency versus state of crisis versus state of disaster. I just want to stress that we’re not asking for extraordinary measures,” he told the News on Friday. “We don’t need new legislation. We have the methods right now to be able to deal with provincial co-ordinated load levelling and distributing the care across the province.”
Parks says health-care providers across Alberta are looking to the province to provide some acknowledgement of the current crisis levels in Edmonton and beyond, and outline a clear action plan.
“If the PR people are saying that there is no crisis, and that these hundreds of health-care workers who are saying we’re in dire straits and we are in desperate need of help, if they are saying we’ve got this wrong, then honestly, God help us. Because that means that nothing is going to happen, and nothing is going to improve in the short term.”
Parks, the president-elect of the emergency physicians section of the Alberta Medical Association, says there are co-ordinated measures available in the provincial toolkit that were typically applied in times of crisis by AHS that have not yet been deployed. He says if provincial co-ordination was functioning the way it should, those measures would already be in place.
These measures include mandatory repatriation of patients that were transferred to a major city hospital for specialized care back to their local hospital for recovery, or the redirection of patients located in strained zones or corridors to other zones with more capacity.
In a statement to the News on Friday, Acute Care Alberta says Alberta Health Services has initiated General Internal Medicine escalation protocols that temporarily pause the acceptance of GIM patients from other zones in Edmonton.
GIM patients constitute the sickest patients with the most complex needs.
These patients will be cared for in their local hospitals with advice and support from Edmonton zone physicians, a measure ACA says will reduce capacity pressures.
The recent escalation notice was issued Dec. 22, after the deaths at Grey Nuns. But ACA says escalation protocols have been in place on and off for most of the past year due to sustained high demand for GIM services in the Edmonton Zone.
Parks says further measures are necessary.
In Medicine Hat, Parks says the city has been reasonably lucky to escape the pressures faced in other parts of the province. While wait times have increased due to the volume of patients, the hospital is still faring pretty well. But since Medicine Hat relies on Calgary for patients requiring specialized care, the strain experienced in major city centres will have trickle-down effects that impact care in the Hat.
Still, Parks says the privileged position of Medicine Hat puts the local hospital in a place to help, if co-ordination is allowed.
“I can’t tell you right now exactly what our bed availability is in Medicine Hat Regional Hospital right now, but it’s possible that we could take some patients from the north and help load level across the province,” said Parks.
“That’s the co-ordinated care that is not occurring right now.”
He says that kind of co-ordination has occurred numerous times in the past, and not just during the extraordinary case of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Parks says the ongoing health-care system refocusing has paralyzed the kind of co-ordination required to initiate these kinds of relief measures.
ACA says that formal, centralized co-ordination of Alberta’s response to current capacity pressures has been in place for more than a month, and that ACA has been providing system-wide co-ordination since it began operation in April. ACA says it is currently leading a cross-provider response that includes daily meetings to co-ordinate patient transfers, staffing and resource deployment.
In a statement to the News on Friday, the Ministry of Hospital and Surgical Health Services says hospitals in the Edmonton area are implementing measures to preserve the emergency department and improve patient flow.
The ministry says these measures include accelerating discharges and transfers where appropriate, limiting non-essential inbound transfers, dedicating 336 beds for respiratory virus season and opening designated surge spaces.
The respiratory virus beds and surge spaces were measures implemented prior to the recent surge in December that led to the current crisis.
In a media availability Dec. 19, Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services Matt Jones said no surgical cancellations had occurred as a result of the mid-December influenza spike.
Alberta Health Services chief medical officer Dr. Peter Jamieson added that it was not part of the plan as forecasted.
ACA told the News that six non-emergency surgeries were rescheduled Tuesday. ACA says no emergency surgeries, including critical cancer and pediatric cases, will be delayed.
