Alberta’s pediatric emergency rooms are dealing with unusually long wait times, and while health officials say the sickest children are getting care quickly, some frontline health care workers are concerned about patient safety.
Wait times closer to 10 hours have become quite common in recent weeks at Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary. United Nurses of Alberta said it is aware of one day when the estimated wait time at the hospital increased to 16 hours.
Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton is also under great pressure.
“The last two weeks, and in particular the last seven days, have been some of the busiest periods I’ve seen in the 10 years I’ve been working at children’s hospital,” said Dr. Stephen Freedman, a physician at the emergency room at Alberta Children’s Hospital and a professor at the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine.
“Some children wait quite routinely, sometimes eight to nine hours most days, for the last two weeks, if they have very poor acuity.”
Freedman said frontline staff are doing their best to keep up with the influx, adding that the most urgent cases are given priority for care and are ideally seen by a doctor within 20 to 30 minutes.
Backups begin as soon as families arrive at the ER. Lines to see the triage nurse, who screens patients and determine who should be given priority for care, have recently popped up at Alberta Children’s Hospital.
According to Freedman, a number of factors have combined to create “a perfect storm,” including high levels of COVID-19 circulating in the community and a late flu season with cases peaking at the same time now that public health measures have gone.
“There are a lot of kids that come to the emergency department. A lot of them need to be there.”
According to Freedman, there is also a continuing rise in children in mental health crises and a shortage of beds to treat them. Staffing shortages are also playing a role, as is the continued need, due to COVID-19, to wear personal protective equipment, which takes time to put on and take off, she said.
ER waits ‘unsafe,’ says Edmonton doctor
“I’m very concerned,” said Dr. Shazma Mithani, an Edmonton emergency room doctor who works at Stollery Children’s Hospital.
She said the delays are longer than anything she’s seen before, with some children waiting as long as seven or eight hours to see her.
“It’s something that we’re discussing every day as a group in terms of what we can do to make sure things stay safe and to avoid bad outcomes.”
Calling the situation “unsafe,” he said patients can wait 45 to 90 minutes to see the triage nurse for evaluation.
“The system is so stressed right now that something bad could happen today in the waiting room… It’s essentially impossible to make sure someone doesn’t get sicker while sitting in the waiting room,” Mithani said.
“The biggest worry is that a child dies. None of us want that to happen, and that would certainly be an extreme case. But that’s always the worry in the back of our minds.”
At Stollery, additional space is now routinely opened up to deal with the overflow of patients in the ER.
Alberta Health Services (AHS) acknowledged the increased pressure on children’s hospitals and said the sickest patients will always be seen first.
“AHS is experiencing significant pressure on our health care system, particularly our EMS and emergency departments, due to the large number of seriously ill patients and the impact of COVID-19, including increased numbers of patients requiring hospitalization. , limited admissions to some hospital units due to infection control requirements and increased staff absences,” AHS spokesman James Wood said in a statement emailed to CBC News.
“This has meant that emergency department wait times are sometimes reaching peak winter levels, which is affecting Alberta Children’s Hospital and Stollery Children’s Hospital.”
Lineups, monitored waiting rooms for the sickest kids
The health authority said the surge in children with viral illnesses is causing temporary lines outside the emergency room in Calgary.
“This has been a major factor in the temporary lineups outside Alberta Children’s Hospital [emergency department] as we need to isolate patients who are exhibiting symptoms of influenza-like illness and therefore need more physical space to accommodate safe distancing,” Wood said.
“When a queue occurs, the nurses monitor the queue and the waiting room to make sure no patients are in critical condition. We are working on a system to bring the queue from outside to inside the building. Our goal is to ensure that everyone people are inside and waiting as short as possible.
Wood said AHS is working to address the issue by moving staff to areas that need them most and prioritizing healthcare workers for COVID-19 testing to minimize staffing shortages.
It also encourages parents to visit a website, designed to help them decide when to take their child to the emergency room and when they can safely receive treatment at home.
United Nurses of Alberta calls the situation “desperate” and says it has received reports of wait times at Alberta Children’s Hospital of up to 16 hours.
“If you’re a parent, you can imagine that any waiting time with a very seriously ill child is terrifying … it’s also terrifying for the staff,” said union president Heather Smith, noting that all major hospitals in Alberta face similar pressures.
Smith said the long wait times, while exacerbated by a recent influx of patients, are a symptom of a larger problem in the system that needs to be addressed.
“When you have 100 percent occupancy or more, which is what our system is running at, [that] It’s a clear indication that we don’t have enough spaces for patients.”
Reference-www.cbc.ca