Lack of beds in Alberta hospitals hampers emergency treatment

In wealthy Alberta, Canada's richest province, emergency care at a hospital is compromised by a lack of beds to send patients to.

In the last few years they've had one Band-Aid solution after another, says Dr. Joe Vipond, a Calgary physician and former chairman of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP). While the health care system in Alberta is operational, it's "covered in duct tape." Emergency care physicians have the feeling there is a crisis in hospitals due to the lack of acute care beds that exist, he says. Once things back up, they back in the emergency room, too, and make it dysfunctional. More than 700 physicians and nurses are attending the CAEP conference in Calgary. The event is a forum for emergency medicine colleagues to exchange ideas, network, and discuss potential solutions to problems faced in emergency rooms across the country. Wait times here are higher than the national average despite Alberta spending more than any other province on health care. Emergency room physician Dr. James Huffman, resident co-ordinator of the event, says 50 percent of the time emergency room beds at the three hospitals he rotates around are occupied by patients who have already been seen. "But there's no bed anywhere else in the hospital, and we can't bring anyone else in from the waiting room because those beds are taken. That's the biggest issue." To deal with this crunch, some Calgary hospitals have found a novel solution. Patients are examined in newly designed examination rooms, built adjacent to the waiting room, and stocked with basic medical equipment. The theory behind those rooms is, if the next person a doctor is scheduled to see is in the waiting room, the physician will take take their chart and take them from the waiting room to the examination room, do the exam, and send them back to the waiting room, Huffman explained. In using that method examinations can be done privately without information being shared around strangers, says Dr. Tom Rich. It's a temporary fix, not a long-term solution to the problem. It isn't an effcient use of a doctor's time to find a patient and take them to where they are supposed to be, he says. But the alternative is to leave them unassisted for eight hours None of the doctors pointed a finger at the provincial government for its lack of support, but rather on the health care system itself for being managed inefficiently. There's times they have come to work and there are 40 admitted patients in their department. With 40 patients and only 60 treatment spaces, "you don't have a 60-bed emergency department, you have 20-bed emergency department," Rich says "You're functioning at 60 per cent capacity."