Alberta doctors raise alarm over inadequate internal medicine staffing

Alberta's doctors are calling a provincial shortage of general internal medicine (GIM) physicians an acute-care crisis and are asking the government for immediate help.

Dr. Paul Parks, president of the Alberta Medical Association — an organization that represents the province's doctors — said to reporters on Monday there's an "escalating crisis" in the acute care system in which GIM doctors work, comparing it to "an aneurysm that just keeps growing and it's getting ready to burst."

GIM physicians "fill a very unique role in the acute-care system, as we often shift to fill gaps for the most complex and vulnerable patients" in Alberta's medical system, Dr. Troy Pederson, the head of the AMA section of internal medicine, said in the Tuesday media conference with Parks.

"We're now at a point where many hospitals GIM teams have run out of both fingers and toes to plug these holes, and we no longer have passed the capacity to help. Provincially, we can no longer even cover the work that we're meant to do. And when Dr. Parks suggested that when GIM goes down, so does the hospital system, there's really no one that can provide the care that we do to such a broad range of patients at that volume."

The AMA is asking the government to "act and invest" immediately to "stabilize our acute care system right now" with volumes at hospitals set to rise as fall approaches.

"There's an immediate crisis in after-hours coverage of the acute vulnerable patients in hospital, and unfortunately, there are very few physicians with both the skill set and the capacity to add additional evening and weekend work to their schedule," Pederson said.

"There is no option but to incentivize this work, to mobilize that small group of physicians that are able to do it."

Alberta Health Services (AHS) told CTV News Edmonton in a statement that while the province's GIM workforce has grown by 11 per cent since 2019-20, it is experiencing recruitment challenges, particularly in finding physicians to work in rural areas and adding that such challenges are experienced by jurisdictions nationally and around the world.

"AHS continues to look for creative ways to retain and build our valuable and critical workforce to address the challenges across the organization," the statement said.

CTV News Edmonton has also contacted the Alberta health ministry for comment.

Parks said while the issues surrounding the acute-care system have been "growing for years," the AMA had identified the workforce challenges involving GIM doctors last fall and presented a stabilization plan to the province "that clearly highlighted ... some of the struggles we're going to have" but has yet to see action on it.

"Government has not moved at all, not one step on that plan," Parks said.

"We're already overflowing in capacity in almost all of our major hospitals, and worse in some areas. This is pre-fall, when we know the cyclical volumes are going up, so we know we're in trouble."