Concerns grow as ER wait times at Alberta's pediatric hospitals balloon

Alberta's pediatric emergency rooms are dealing with unusually long wait times, and while health officials say the sickest children are getting care quickly, some front-line health-care workers are worried about patient safety.

Waits times approaching 10 hours have become fairly common in recent weeks at Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary. The United Nurses of Alberta said it's aware of one day when the estimated wait time at the hospital surged to 16 hours.

The Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton is also under serious pressure.

"The past couple of weeks, and in particular the last seven days, have been some of the busiest time periods that I've seen in the 10 years that I've been working at the children's hospital," said Dr. Stephen Freedman, a physician in the ER at Alberta Children's Hospital and professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine.

"Some children are waiting pretty routinely sometimes eight to nine hours on most days, over the last two weeks, if they are very low acuity."

Freedman said  front-line staff are doing their best to keep up with the influx, adding the most urgent cases are prioritized for care and are ideally seen by a doctor within 20 or 30 minutes.

The backups are starting as soon as families arrive in the ER. Lineups to see the triage nurse, who assesses patients and determines who needs to be prioritized for care, have recently snaked out the doors at Alberta Children's Hospital.  

According to Freedman, a number of factors have combined to create "a perfect storm" — including high levels of COVID-19 circulating in the community and a late flu season with cases peaking at the same time now that public health measures are gone.

"There are a large number of children coming to the emergency department. A lot of them do need to be there."

According to Freedman, there is also an ongoing surge in kids in mental health crisis and a shortage of beds to treat them. Staffing shortages are also playing a role, as is the ongoing need, due to COVID-19, to wear personal protective equipment, which takes time to put on and take off, he said.

"I'm very worried," said Dr. Shazma Mithani, an Edmonton ER physician who works at the Stollery Children's Hospital.

She said the delays are longer than anything she's seen before, with some kids waiting up to seven or eight hours to see her. 

"It's something we're discussing every single day as a group in terms of what we can do to ensure things stay safe and to prevent any bad outcomes."

Calling the situation "unsafe," she said patients can wait 45 to 90 minutes to see the triage nurse to be assessed.