Alberta NDP calls for state of emergency over excessive emergency room wait times

The Alberta NDP is calling on the United Conservative government to declare a state of emergency for the province’s hospital emergency rooms.

It comes after a letter from doctors was leaked on Monday detailing as many as six preventable deaths tied to long wait times.

Dr. Paul Parks, president-elect of the Alberta Medical Association’s section of emergency medicine, said hallways and waiting rooms have become “death zones,” and wonders if people will “drop dead” when they should be receiving life-saving care in a functional emergency care space.

There are six examples of cases that ended in deaths and more than 30 “near misses” — high-stakes diagnoses delayed by clogged waiting rooms.

The cases echo Prashant Sreekumar’s case, the 44-year-old Edmonton man who died on Dec. 22, making headlines after waiting nearly eight hours with chest pains and increasing blood pressure in an emergency department.

The Opposition party says the declaration should stay in place until each hospital is below 100 per cent planned capacity with dedicated overflow beds staffed and funded.

By defining this situation as an emergency, it would signal to all parties involved that crisis-level interventions, solutions, actions, and decision-making should be considered and prioritized.

Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi says health-care professionals and advocates have been raising the alarm about hospitals for weeks.

“People don’t die in the waiting room. People don’t die before they’ve been seen,” he said.

“It’s not a matter of, ‘people were so ill they wouldn’t be able to make it out of there.’ That does happen, of course it does. But those were six specific cases in a short period of time where people died waiting for service.”

The NDP is also calling for a central command for focused coordination and decision-making in response to the creation of four separate agencies within AHS. They say frontline workers have been calling for clear decision-making with a single leadership team or agency.

Kyle Warner, press secretary to Hospitals Minister Matt Jones, didn’t comment on the details of the letter, but said every hospital provider has internal quality assurance processes that automatically review cases with negative outcomes.

Jones said at a press conference on Jan. 15 that Alberta hospitals “are under extreme pressure,” and more acute care beds, and more physicians and healthcare workers are needed.

He also said a state of emegency is within the perview of the provincial government if there are hospital pressures.

“We do have the tools to appropriately respond to respiratory virus and hospital pressures, and in the event that we would need to escalate to obtain additional powers to manage the situation, we would, as governments have in the past,” Jones said.

The Alberta Medical Association also called on the government to declare a state of emergency.

Meanwhile, the provincial government is making its own healthcare announcement from Calgary’s Peter Lougheed Hospital on Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m.

With files from The Canadian Press