‘Hindsight is 20-20’: Province planning new acute care beds 2 years after AHS documents showed serious shortage

The province says it plans to add an additional 700 acute care beds to two hospitals in Edmonton. CTV News Edmonton's Chelan Skulski reports.

The government of Alberta said it’s hoping to start planning more hospital beds in the Edmonton area, a plan some say is coming too late.

On Thursday, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange announced $2 million in Budget 2025 to go toward planning for 700 acute care beds, to be split between the Misericordia Hospital and the Grey Nuns Community Hospital.

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Infrastructure Minister Martin Long said the beds will eventually be located in two new towers located on the existing hospitals' grounds.

Neither Long nor LaGrange could offer any timeline on when construction would begin or when those beds would be available.

“We’ve done work for a decade on looking at how we would expand the capacity of both these hospitals,” Long said. “The $2 million will allow us to work with infrastructure, health and Acute Care Alberta to come back with a plan that will have a timeline.”

Beds needed now

According to data from the Health Quality Council of Alberta, between July and September 2024, all of Edmonton’s large hospitals were operating over or near capacity.

The Royal Alexandra Hospital was at 97 per cent full, the Grey Nuns at 99 per cent, the Misericordia was at 106 per cent and the University of Alberta Hospital was at 110.

The data shows the last time the University of Alberta Hospital dropped below 100 per cent capacity was in 2020.

In 2023, an internal Alberta Health Services (AHS) document showed the province was aware that Edmonton has a deficit of hundreds of hospital beds – with the city expected to be about 1,500 beds short by 2026.

Dr. Steve Fisher has worked in the Royal Alexandra Hospital emergency department for more than 17 years and said he can’t remember a time when wait times were “this consistently long.”

“These days, it’s routine that I’m seeing patients with over 10 or 12 hour wait times just to see a doctor in the emergency and then patients that are waiting days to go upstairs to the acute care beds,” he said.

Heather Smith, president of United Nurses of Alberta, said the announcement is long overdue and doesn’t answer when hospitals can expect any actual relief.

“This is talking about $2 million to basically come up with a plan. There is no timeline, there is no cost,” Smith said. “We are desperate currently in terms of capacity and resources.

“Admission that we’ve had a 400,000 population growth in the last two years means that this kind of announcement, if it was going to be, should have been made a long time ago.”

When asked why planning on new beds wasn’t started earlier to address a known shortage, LaGrange said “hindsight is always 20-20.”

“I have to look forward, because I only became the minister a year-and-a-half ago,” she said. “I have to say, there were gaps in the strategic plan that I saw that was coming out of Alberta Health Services. It’s why we went in and did the refocusing.”

“We’re going to build this project as quickly as possible, but we have to plan it first,” she added.

In response to a CTV News Edmonton query asking how staffing will be added for the expanded bed capacity, the press secretary for the health ministry said in a statement “it’s too early to provide specific staffing details” but that “the premise that expanding beds will outpace workforce growth is simply not accurate.”

“While we are expanding healthcare infrastructure to meet the needs of Albertans, we’re also continuing to grow the workforce to meet the demands of an evolving healthcare system,” Jessi Rampton, the press secretary for the Office of the Minister of Health, said in an email.

LaGrange and Long both said expanding the two hospitals will be more cost-effective and faster than building the South Edmonton Hospital project, which was cancelled last year after $69 million had already been spent.

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Smith said that without a plan or budget, she questions how the province knows it’s saving money and time on the new project rather than moving ahead with one already started.

“Show me that it, in fact, is cheaper to do this than to proceed with the South Edmonton Hospital,” she said. “Why is this not being done with creating a publicly-owned facility versus putting more beds in the hands of private operators.”

LaGrange said that hospital would cost $4.8 billion, while the Alberta NDP (who started the project) campaigned in 2023 it would build it for a cost of at least $1.8 billion.

‘We need to find better ways’

Patrick Dumelie, CEO of Covenant Health, said the funding was an “important step forward” in meeting the “urgent needs and significant increase in acute care bed capacity that’s required” in Edmonton and across Alberta.

Dumelie said “all roads currently lead to hospitals,” with people relying on emergency rooms for mental health and addictions issues or because they don’t have a family doctor.

He added that about 25 per cent of Grey Nuns acute care beds at any given time have seniors in them that “don’t belong in acute care.”

Fisher also pointed to the need for more capacity across the system.

“I’ve been saying for years … the log jam is really coming from the long-term care spaces,” he said. “It probably doesn’t sound sexy to a system to just build a bunch of nursing homes, but that really is where this investment might be better placed.”

LaGrange acknowledged there was a problem moving patients through the system, saying the province needs to “get better at the flow” of patients to alternative levels of care.

“We cannot continue to have Albertans waiting in the hospital for continuing care services and supports,” Ashley Stevenson, the press secretary for the Ministry of Seniors, Community and Social Services, told CTV News Edmonton in a statement.

She said AHS was “ill-suited” to provide Alternative Level of Care (ALC) patients the support they need and promised the new Assisted Living Alberta (ALA) beginning on April 1 would deliver more effective and consistent care across the province.

Budget 2025 included $3.7 billion for ALA, a funding increase of $186 million, the Stevenson said.

The province said Acute Care Alberta will also become operational on April 1 and will take over emergency health services from AHS.

On Monday LaGrange said the new agency will help “better meet the needs of Albertans and ensure improved access to the best health care possible.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Chelan Skulski and CTV News Calgary’s Mark Villani