Calgary ER doctors say don't blame them, long wait times a result of a systemic crisis

Some Calgary ER doctors say there are days when they feel as though their hands are tied, knowing they don't have the staff or the space to treat their patients in a timely manner.

That's because emergency beds and resources are increasingly being taken up by in-patients — people who've already been admitted to the hospital but have nowhere to go because the units are full, sometimes beyond capacity. 

"It's incredibly frustrating and patients are very frustrated," said Dr. James Andruchow, ER physician at Foothills Medical Centre.

"But it's analogous to being angry at the car in front of you when there's a multi-car pileup one kilometre down the road … this is not just an emergency problem, this is a system-wide capacity issue," said Andruchow.

Andruchow says there are many reasons why the issue is coming to a head right now.

There's a nursing shortage. There's still a lot of patients being admitted with COVID. There's a provincewide surgical initiative that's trying to ease the pandemic-related backlog of non-elective surgeries. And there's a mental health and addiction crisis. 

Dr. Rick Morris, who works in the emergency room at the Peter Lougheed Centre, says critical patients are still being seen and treated efficiently, whether that be in a hallway or other non-traditional setting. But he says it's the people with a bellyache or other non-critical illness who are left to wait.

He says there are times when all of the PLC's roughly 30 ER beds are filled with admitted patients, pushing wait times to 12, 14, 16 hours.

"You feel at a loss and you just think … if you're not that sick, you should go home, go see your family doctor the next day (because) you're gonna be waiting for hours, unfortunately. We don't want you to, but that's the reality," said Morris.

Andruchow says the ER carries the brunt of the overcapacity load. He says that while in-patient units can run 10 to 20 per cent over capacity, ERs can run 80 to 100 per cent over capacity.

"Our system right now is unsustainable, and these issues are only getting worse. And so yeah, I would strongly advocate that all of our various political parties put together real strategies to deal with this," said Andruchow.

Andruchow says there is a policy in place that is supposed to trigger the movement of emergency in-patients up to the units when they reach a certain threshold.

But he says it's not being done consistently because in-patient resources are stretched, too.

"Having predictable, proportional surge strategies that allow the patient care workload — and, quite honestly, the risk — to be distributed among the system is something that could be done as of tomorrow and would make a significant improvement in the care of emergency department patients."