A patient has died after waiting in the Royal Alexandra Hospital emergency room for care, according to doctors with knowledge of the incident who spoke with CBC News.
The person died on May 8, according to Dr. Warren Thirsk, an emergency department physician at the Royal Alex and the Alberta Medical Association’s emergency medicine section president.
Thirsk wasn’t on shift when the death occurred, but colleagues briefed him about it the next morning, he said. He added that he has knowledge of the event because of his AMA position.
His frustration continues to grow, he said, because he has sounded the alarm on overcrowding and lack of resources before. He called this patient’s death an “‘I told you so’ moment.”
“I’ve said before, publicly, that there have been deaths in the emergency department and deaths in the waiting room due to overcrowding and wait times,” Thirsk said Saturday.
Sarah Hoffman, the Opposition NDP’s hospital and surgical facilities critic, said in the legislature Wednesday that a person died in the Royal Alexandra Hospital waiting room after EMS dropped them off.
Dr. Brian Wirzba, an internal medicine doctor in Edmonton who’s president of the AMA, told CBC News Sunday that he knows the death happened on May 8, after a man presented to the emergency room. The man was assessed and “received some therapies, but because of overcrowding within the emergency department was left in the waiting room,” he said.
Physicians aren’t strangers to death, he said, but this death, and another earlier this year at Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Community Hospital, shows patients dying in emergency rooms.
“An emergency room [is] where patients come and are expecting to get care,” Wirzba said.
CBC News asked Alberta Health Services, the provincial agency in charge of most hospitals, to confirm the death. It sent a statement via email.
“Alberta Health Services (AHS) takes situations like this seriously and is committed to providing a safe environment that supports high-quality care,” the statement reads in part.
“AHS has undertaken an initial investigation and a Quality Assurance Review will be conducted. The case has been reviewed by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.”
Subsequent questions from CBC News about the state of its investigation, whether that investigation will yield recommendations and how long the person waited for care went unanswered.
Not the first time
The Royal Alex patient is among several other people provincewide who’ve died in recent months while waiting for care in hospitals.
Late last year, Prashant Sreekumar, 44, died after waiting in the Grey Nuns hospital’s ER for nearly eight hours.
Earlier this year, Dr. Paul Parks, former president of the AMA’s section of emergency medicine, sent a letter to the Alberta government, detailing examples of six more hospital deaths that happened over a two-week span in January. The letter also listed 30 cases that nearly ended in a death.
The letter pinned most of the deaths — and what doctors call “near misses” — to clogged hospitals.
In January, the provincial government ordered a judge-led inquiry into Sreekumar’s death and announced it was creating a program through which physicians would help triage patients.
‘No substantial change’ on frontlines: doctor
Thirsk told CBC News that many of the recommendations that came as a result of Sreekumar’s death were tied to funding.
“A recommendation without funds to support it, or make change, means that no change is actually happening,” he said.
“So for those of us working on the front lines, no substantial change has been made. “
CBC News presented Thirsk’s concerns to the ministries of Primary and Preventative Health Services and Hospital and Surgical Health Services. Neither has responded yet.
“I think that it needs to be said that these deaths are predictable,” Thirsk said.
“We have evidence of that. It’s going to happen again. I think that ultimately this is a long-standing, decades-long failure of accountability. “
In a CBC Calgary article written in 2008, doctors were frustrated by what they called unacceptably long wait times.
At the time, the Calgary Health Region said patients in the city waited about two hours on average for an ER bed in 2006-07, compared to 68 minutes in 2002-03.
Thirsk has been an emergency physician for more than two decades.
“It makes me quite frankly, sad and frustrated that you can repeatedly sound the same warning to the people who are in charge of the healthcare system and they would prefer to ignore you because it’s expedient, and then normalize abnormal,” he said.
Physicians have guidelines around how long it should take before they see someone in the emergency room, Thirsk said. Because of strain and overcrowding, those timelines are constantly being compromised.
“If you come in with crushing chest pain, we should probably see you within 15 minutes. And so 68 minutes seems like a long time to last. Two hours seems unacceptably long. Four hours is ridiculously unacceptable. Like it’s just frankly atrocious,” he said.
“And then as we exponentially increase that number to our eight, our 12, our 16-hour wait, our 24-hour wait — it’s indefensible and it is just frankly a lack of any progress over several decades.”
Thirsk stressed that the entire conversation around healthcare needs to be re-thought.
“I think if we reframe our thinking around healthcare and turn it from a budget item and an expense to be chopped or a tax issue to be debated, and we view it as a resource that all human beings need, it is no different than water coming out of the tap,” he said.
