‘Medical disaster’: Alberta Medical Association details over-capacity in hospitals, calls on province to declare crisis

Alberta doctors are calling on the province to declare a state of emergency to address the health-care system. CTV News Edmonton's Connor Hogg reports.

The Alberta Medical Association (AMA) is once again calling on the province to declare a state of emergency as it says Edmonton hospitals exceed capacity.

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“In the hospital wards, we have 110 to 120 per cent capacity,” said AMA’s emergency medicine section president-elect Paul Parks. “Some of our internal wards are at 150 to 170 per cent capacity … We have rooms that were designed for two patients (that) have four patients. We have patients in hallways.”

Maddison McKee, press secretary to Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange, said the health-care system is using “all available resources.”

“Calls for a ‘public health state of emergency’ are misguided and would add nothing to what is already being done, said McKee in an email to CTV News Edmonton.

Parks called on the province to declare a crisis last month after Prashanth Sreekumar died waiting hours for treatment at the Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Mill Woods.

He said there are multiple factors impacting hospitals right now, including a “huge surge” of seasonal influenza and respiratory viruses on top of “huge volumes” of very elderly patients living with chronic diseases.

“The cases you’re hearing about are one of many, they’re just the tip of the iceberg,” said Parks. “That’s why our teams and our health-care workers are pleading with government: please acknowledge that it is this bad and please give us some help.”

He said these issues have been building up over the years, but have been made worse with the province’s restructuring of the health-care system.

“There are lots of solutions that exist in a complicated, connected, integrated health-care system that we can use,” said Parks. “But sadly, over the last two, three years, our government has blown that up, disintegrated and removed any kind of command and control centre, and that’s what we’re desperately pleading for.”

Some of those solutions could look like postponing scheduled surgeries and using surgical beds for very sick patients in overflowed areas of the hospital.

“We have patients put in cubby holes with no call bell to ring the nurse. It’s literally an old fashioned ‘ding-ding’ bell to try to make noise to get a nurse because they were never designed to hold a patient,” said Parks.

Acute Care Alberta (ACA) said a total of five “non-emergent surgeries” have been rescheduled across the province due to “current capacity challenges.”

“Alberta, like other provinces, is seeing an increase in patient demand due to the respiratory virus season, and Alberta Health Services (AHS) facilities, especially those in large urban areas, continue to be very busy with high volumes of patients. This is not unusual for this time of year,” said ACA in a recent statement.

‘It’s a medical disaster’

Raj Sherman, an emergency physician and former MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark, said data from the Health Quality Council shows the health-care system in Alberta was in crisis mode in August, before flu season kicked in.

“Our hospitals are full of sick patients, and we have a lot of patients who actually aren’t sick. They’re fragile seniors,” said Sherman. “So we have two hospitals in Edmonton basically full of fragile patients, and that causes a backup.”

“We are not meeting the time standards of care for people who are extraordinarily ill. When demand for care strips the ability to deliver care, we call it a disaster. It’s a medical disaster,” said Sherman. “This is why the emergency doctors are asking for a state of emergency in the health system in the Edmonton region, we are not providing safe care right now.”

In 1992, Alberta had a population of 2.7 million and had 11,700 staffed hospital beds. Today there are 8,800 beds serving five million Albertans, said Sherman.

Premier Danielle Smith appointed Sherman to the council in June 2024. He resigned in August 2025 after serving one year of a three-year term.

Alberta’s ministry of hospital and surgical health services said it is “cautiously optimistic” that demand eases as respiratory illnesses stabilize.

“In the Edmonton area, hospitals are implementing measures to preserve emergency department capacity and improve patient flow,” said a statement from the ministry Thursday. “These include accelerating discharges and transfers where appropriate, limiting non-essential inbound transfers, dedicating 336 beds specifically for respiratory virus season, and opening designated surge spaces to manage increased demand.”

It says the number of Alternate Level Care (ALC) patients in hospitals has decreased by about 20 per cent since Assisted Living Alberta became operational in September.

ALC patients are defined by the Canadian Institute for Health Information as those who occupy a bed but do not require the intensity of services provided in that care setting.

An August report from the Health Quality Council obtained by CTV News Edmontons shows that the Sturgeon Community Hospital in St. Albert was 40-per-cent full of ALC patients. The Misericordia followed closely behind at 36.9 per cent.

The Grey Nuns, Royal Alexandra and University of Alberta hospitals all hovered around 20-per-cent full of ALC patients.

Alberta’s Acute Care Action Plan, announced in November, plans for an additional 1,000 acute care beds in Edmonton.

“We will continue to monitor system pressures closely and work with health system partners to respond to challenges as they arise and manage access to care across Alberta,” said the ministry.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Connor Hogg and Nicole Weisberg