Canadian doctor: Patients dying during average 6-hour waits for emergency care in Alberta Canada - Get ready for Obamacar
There is a “crisis right now” in Edmonton hospital emergency rooms, where some people are dying or having heart attacks as they wait an average of six hours for treatment, Dr. Felix Soibelman says. “We’ve had numerous, numerous adverse events in our waiting room, and these people suffer,” Soibelman, president of the Edmonton Emergency Physicians Association, said Wednesday.
“People even have heart attacks in our city’s waiting rooms and we recognize that we can’t get to them. We’ve even had deaths in our waiting rooms. These events have happened. They have been recorded. It doesn’t happen often, but it certainly does happen, and the bottom line is it shouldn’t happen.”
He will join other emergency physicians, administrators and government officials today to try to find solutions at a two-day conference put on by Alberta Health Services to address emergency room overcrowding.
Soibelman said the Edmonton region of Alberta Health Services has done good work in trying to reduce waiting lines.
Triage liaison doctors, for instance, are working in four city hospitals, visiting patients in the waiting room, ordering early blood work and taking all phone calls from ambulances and rural centres.
These new policies are evidence that Alberta Health Services “is trying and is really dedicated to make our emergency care in the city tenable,” Soibelman said.
Such policies, and ones introduced by other provinces and countries, will be discussed during the conference.
But a local policy which requires nurses to move admitted patients out of the emergency room into regular wards when they fill a quarter of the emergency stretchers, isn’t working two years after its implementation, Soibelman said.
The full capacity policy is meant to have staff across the hospital share the responsibility of admitted patients and to open up the backlog at emergency doors.
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