The Current - Alberta doctor says ER system is in “crisis”

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Dr. Paul Parks is an ER doctor in Medicine Hat, and President-elect of the section of Emergency physicians of the Alberta Medical Association. He describes ERs that simply cannot cope with the number of patients  needing care, and says the Smith government's efforts to reform the healthcare system are only creating more chaos.

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To only come this far. Allegiance. New season. Watch free on CBC Gem. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. In November of last year, the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, announced her government's plan to improve acute care in her province. It starts with targeted investments for immediate relief of the worst pressures, and this means hundreds more beds, tens of thousands of extra surgeries, and expanded emergency and community care services.

along with shorter weights, less crowding, and faster care, it means growing the health care system so it can cope with a larger and older population. Part of the plan, as you just heard, is designed to reduce wait times and approved care in emergency departments. But in the weeks since that announcement, ERs continued to be under enormous strain. An early flu season added to the pressure. And then in late December, a 44-year-old man in Edmonton died after spending eight hours in the emergency department, just as he was finally getting medical attention, according to his wife. Dr. Paul Parks is an emergency room physician in Medicine Hat

and President-elect of the Emergency Physician Section of the Alberta Medical Association. Dr. Parks, good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. In a word, how would you describe the situation in Alberta emergency rooms right now? Under chaos, I guess that's two words, so chaos, but it is really bad. Like, this is not hyperbole. We're facing every day on...

simple terms we have so many sick admitted patients in our emerged departments that can't go up to the hospitals because they're overflowing that at times two-thirds to our entire emergency department is occupied by admitted patients that should be on the ward for specialty services and we're often operating out of a handful of beds at the best for for you know 50 to 100 patients out in the waiting room kind of thing I want to talk more about that backlog, if I can put it that way, just in terms of being able to get people into beds in the hospital. But when you say that it's chaos, what does that look like in your emergency department in Medicine Hat? Paint me a picture of what that looks like. Well, I mean, you know, and it's all, I should really stress,

is all of the emergency departments in Alberta right now, all the big ones. But what it just means is that you are just regularly on a daily basis. Our teams, our emerge departments are functioning like a hospital word. the sense of that they'll have very sick patients with, you know, infections and strokes and heart attacks and, you know, traumas and cancer and all the things you can think of that are really, really sick. They're stuck and stranded in our emergency departments and our teams are spending like 100% of their time taking care of these really sick people. Meanwhile, the

waiting rooms will, you know, continue to grow where there's 60, 70, 80 patients in the waiting room with very severe things like chest pain and appendicitis and all the things you can think of that you go to the Emerge Department for, but we simply just have no place to see them. So in the last, you know, week or two since this case became very public as an example, a bunch of my colleagues have reached out and said, listen, Paul, like we're seeing heart attacks standing in our, you know, in our hallway and trying to give them really, you know, top of the line medications without monitoring and without a nurse to help us. And this is the regular kind of every single day.

This case that is kind of driving this conversation is just the tip of the iceberg. We're seeing cases like this almost every day in our major emerged departments. And so you co-wrote an op-ed in the Edmonton Journal and saying that emergency departments are in some ways the catch-haul for every health system failure. What did you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, we see the sins of the system. So right now, in our acute care system in Alberta, you know, the only place that can't, shut its doors or can't say, hey, we can't take any more as the Emerge Department. And now what we're seeing again and again, you know, very complicated patients after surgery, something's

wrong, go to emerge. Patients with cancer that have complications of their cancer treatments go to emerge. Patients with, you know, you know, a million albertans without any family physicians go to emerge. It's just endless. But the problem is, is that this, the Premier talks about, you know, nice, pretty announcements about making, you know, making things better. But in reality, three years, it's been constant reorganization and disintegration of our system to the point where it's truly non-functional. Most of our emergency departments cannot pick up that slack 24-7, you know, endlessly for all the very, very, very sick patients that we're seeing every day. And I have to stress, these aren't people with colds and sniffles and stubbed toes that are blocking up our emergency

department. We're talking about heart attacks and really, you know, surgical emergencies and and patients that are, if they don't get seen in a timely fashion, can die like the case we're discussing. So it is, you know, it's been endless. It's been endless political interference and really shuffling and just changing everything for the last three years. But I have to say that this is a political failure. If the Premier doesn't declare it as a crisis and doesn't say, listen, our acute care system and our merged departments truly are no longer functioning in a meaningful manner for Albertans that we're going to address this. and we're going to put all our resources to do short and medium-term solutions, more people are going to pass to die and or suffer needless.

She has said, I mean, we just heard that, that in some ways some of the problems here are attributed to a growing and aging population in the province. Does she have a point there? Oh, there's no question this government has inherited, you know, 20 years of deferring capital investment and workforce planning and absolutely huge population growth. and a lot of our patients are living longer and have very complicated diseases. But this is no surprise.

I mean, I personally have talked to the Premier three years ago and told them how bad this tsunami was and how we had to really do, you know, very concerted efforts so that our emerged system didn't collapse and didn't become non-functional. And so, and there are things we can do. But meanwhile, the government has spent, you know, the last couple of years, as I said, disintegrating your system, but also going to introduce private surgeries out in the community and drive more of our specialists and our, you know, our expert physicians and work for us out of our hospitals to the point where, you know, there's almost going to be nobody

left other than emerged docs. And it's just, it's untenable. And like I said, I got to stress, this case is so tragic for that family and people are hearing about it. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. We're seeing cases like these every day and people dying that nobody's even aware of because they didn't have an advocate to actually, you know, put it, put it out there and make the public aware of what's happening. We asked for comment from the office of the Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services, Matt Jones, and that ministry says the plan is for 1,000 new acute care beds in Edmonton and Calgary, and that will help alleviate the pressure on emergency departments, perhaps like

yours. What impact do you think that will have? A thousand beds seems like a big number. It sounds like an awesome number. It sounds like it could have said 10,000 and it would have been even better. Honestly, when? Like, when are those coming? I mean, we've been talking about...

So the Premier herself canceled the only... The only hospital that was ready to come in, in our Edmonton, the south of Edmonton Hospital cancelled it. It would have been aligned in 2026 with probably 400 beds. A thousand beds, I would say to every Canadian, every Albertan out there, ask when. If they're coming in 10 years, how many more cases like these are we going to be discussing? How many more needlessly, you know, suffering? Think about the every single day we're seeing patients that are in 10 out of 10.

severe abdominal pain that we can't get pain meds for 12, 15 hours. And they're going to just say, hey, we're going to give you a thousand beds. The best case, those could possibly come online, maybe what, 2035? I'd love to hear the Mr. Jones correct me. Maybe he'll argue with me and say it's 2034. What are we going to do in the meantime? I just got to say, too, this is a desperate plea here. Like, the reason we're talking about this is we need help.

The emergency departments across this country are struggling, but they're just, they're the symptom of the whole acute cancer. system. We have a couple of minutes left. Let me ask you two questions. One is that we've been talking about the death of Prashant Shrikumar in December. The government, the Albury government, has ordered a review of what happened there. What is the one question that you want asked in that review? Are they looking at this in the big system-wide picture? Are they going to do what they typically do and just look at it as one case in one emerge department and in one moment of time? And typically when they do the latter, it means that they just are like, oh, look, you know, this triage nurse should have recognized this and this.

And they don't see the big context of that. This is every single day in every one of our major emerge departments. And the near misses that we're having to, you know, like where people are nearly, nearly die and pass away and we get them in. You know, look at all those things. Look at the big context. And what's the now? What are we going to do now? Not 2035 with 1,000 promised beds.

What are they going to do? Declare the crisis that it is. If they don't, they won't mobilize resources and they won't actually fix the problem. And so we're out of time, but just very, very briefly, what is your message then to people who need to go to the emergency department? They hear this and they don't know what's going to happen. What is your message very briefly to them? Yeah, to a big, big piece, be patient. We're trying our absolute best, the people showing up really are trying their absolute best.

But write your premiers, write your MLAs, write your governments and tell them that we have to do better because honestly, It is getting to the point where we want to care for people, they should show up, but they need to know it's going to be inordinate waits at times. They might be seen in a hallway, and it's not the kind of care that they would be expecting. Wish you the best of luck when you head into your emergency department. Dr. Parks, thank you very much. Thanks very much for discussing this. Dr. Paul Parks is an emergency room physician in Medicine Hat,

president-elect of the Emergency Physicians Section of the Alberta Medical Association, and he was in Medicine Hat, Alberta. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.