Calgary emergency rooms facing severe capacity crisis, NDP says
The Alberta NDP released documents Tuesday that suggest Calgary emergency rooms are facing a severe capacity crisis.
The data reveal a sharply growing number of Tier 1 — or high-risk overcapacity triggers.
T1 overcapacity triggers are initiated at hospitals when a patient needing either resuscitation or rapid medical intervention — or is expected to — would not be able to get that care.
A high-risk overcapacity protocol was triggered 43 times in Calgary emergency departments in September last year, the NDP says.
“Even more alarming is that on Sept. 24 every one of the five hospitals reported on triggered a high-risk overcapacity protocol,” the party said in a release.
The NDP says decades of government neglect of the health-care system is to blame.
“Calgarians are worried about their families' future. They're worried that further cuts will make the situation worse," said NDP Leader Rachel Notley in a release.
Prentice responds
Premier Jim Prentice says his party recognized when he became premier there were serious challenges in terms of emergency wards and made moves to deal with the issues.
A big part of the emergency room issues in Alberta is the lack of sufficient long-term care beds for seniors, Prentice says.
"[Senior citizens] find themselves, as my own mother did, in emergency rooms in hospitals because there is no other place for them to go," he said.
Prentice says the minister of health indicated close to 400 beds would be opened to help alleviate some of the acute care pressure, and according to Prentice, so far, 300 beds have been opened.
"Clearly efforts will have to focus elsewhere that on the emergency wards but there needs to be a focus on where expenditures are going at AHS, what the level of bureaucracy is and where the dollars are being spent," he said.
Prentice says health care costs in Alberta have doubled in the last 10 years from around $8-billion to close to $17-billion.
"Clearly, in that context, there is room for efficiency and improvements, in terms of what it costs," he said.
Prentice says the government will be providing more information about the health care situation in the coming weeks.
