Opinion: Where is Alberta's promised 'seamless patient experience?' Last week, a 44-year old father of two died after eight hours in the waiting room of Edmonton’s Grey Nuns hospital. It’s tragic for Prashant Sreekumar, his wife and children, and severely traumatizing for the health-care workers on shift that day. While some are pointing fingers at the triage process or the emergency department (ED), this is a system problem.

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Last week, a 44-year old father of two died after eight hours in the waiting room of Edmonton’s Grey Nuns hospital. It’s tragic for Prashant Sreekumar, his wife and children, and severely traumatizing for the health-care workers on shift that day. While some are pointing fingers at the triage process or the emergency department (ED), this is a system problem.

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The ED is the catch-all for every health system failure. While it’s true that many patients present to EDs because they cannot access a family doctor, improving primary care access alone won’t solve ED overcrowding.

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The demand is coming from all directions. People enduring intolerable waits for specialists, CTs, and MRIs go there to expedite testing, or because their symptoms become too much to manage. More people have chronic illnesses, requiring increasingly complex care, and there are more frail elderly — both groups being more likely to need the ED. Surging mental health needs are simply not being met by community resources.

Volumes and complexity are increasing, but the biggest cause of gridlock is after the ED. In Calgary and Edmonton, it’s routine for over half the ED beds to be filled with patients awaiting hospital admission. Hospital capacity frequently exceeds 100 per cent, in part because it’s common for nearly 25 per cent of usable hospital beds to be occupied by people waiting for a bed in continuing care.

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