Alberta hospital patients share ‘horror stories’ as long wait times continue

More than 8,000 residents of the province are sharing what they call 'health-care horror stories.' It's part of a new campaign from CUPE Alberta.

Elaine Bonfield visited the emergency department at Calgary’s South Health Campus hospital three times in October for concerns about severe chest pains.

Bonfield says she waited eight hours and that no investigation or pain management was given.

“They told me I needed an urgent scope,” she said. “I still don’t have it, and that was in October.”

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“When you go in there, you’re looking for hope. When you go in, you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m feeling the worst I’ve ever felt, and I need help.’”

Bonfield says patients were sitting in hallways and laying on floors.

“Sitting in waiting rooms for eight hours around other people that are really upset – there’s violence in the waiting rooms, there’s people that are vomiting beside you, children screaming – it’s a very unsafe, scary environment.”

Bonfield’s referral from Alberta Health Services says it was accepted at the start of December, following her visit in October.

It says she has been triaged as semi-urgent, with a current wait time for the appointment of 26-41 weeks.

“I’ve also just lost hope at this point,” she said. “I’m telling my family we need to be healthy because I don’t want to rely on the emergency systems or the health-care system.”

Bonfield believes Alberta’s health-care system needs to focus on helping mental health patients and offering more space.

“Getting more beds, that’s a huge thing,” she said. “Making incentives for the doctors to stay in Alberta, to want to be here.”

Bonfield is one of more than 8,000 Albertans who have shared her stories with CUPE as part of its online campaign pushing for Danielle Smith to declare a state of emergency as ERs “crumble into chaos.”

The campaign received 25,000 signatures in three weeks, according to CUPE.

In a release, CUPE Alberta President Raj Uppal said that over the last decade, Alberta’s population has increased by 37 per cent, but hospital beds have only increased by 13 per cent.

“Health-care workers will move heaven and earth to help patients, but after years of UCP underfunding, they are limited in what they can do,” he said.

Dr. Paul Parks, president-elect of the Section of Emergency Medicine with the Alberta Medical Association, says stories like Bonfield’s are all to common.

“Those horror stories are just going to keep on going,” he said. “More and more people are going to have horrendous outcomes waiting in our waiting rooms.”

Parks adds that hospital space is filling up, and quickly.

“The Misericordia Emergency Department as an example right now in Edmonton, it has about in the neighborhood of 60 to 65 beds,” he said.

“It currently has 54 admitted patients that are admitted with broken hips, pneumonia, strokes, cancers that should be up on the floors and another 24 pending consults.”

Parks says the deadly flu season also pushed hospitals beyond their limits.

“Thankfully, we’ve hit the peak of influenza. And things are improving on that front, but it was a very deadly and difficult influenza season.”

Premier reacts

Asked about Alberta’s emergency room wait times at an unrelated news conference on Monday, Premier Danielle Smith said there’s “no question” that work needs to be done on the first point of access people have going into emergency rooms – and making sure that emergency treatment beds aren’t “filled with patients waiting to get a bed on a higher floor.”

“Making sure that people aren’t parked in emergency treatment beds, that there are open beds – so that if somebody needs to be patient, that they’re moved along – and that will it change the experience people have in the emergency room,” she said.

“We need to hear about it. I mean, every time we uncover a new problem – we saw that we knew that we had a problem of people not being connected to family doctors. So, we created a new doctor model – and we now have 841 doctors who are accepting new patients.”