$65M ER at Misericordia is merely a stopgap
Misericordia needs more than new $65-million emergency room
First the good news.
The Misericordia Hospital is getting a brand-new, $65-million emergency department.
Last Thursday, Health Minister Sarah Hoffman unveiled plans not to renovate the cramped, old ER but to build a whole new one on the far west side of the hospital, just across the street from West Edmonton Mall.
The new emergency will have room for 66 treatment beds, instead of the current 32.
It will have six ambulance bays, instead of four.
It will be more than twice as large as the current space: 5,000 square metres, instead of the current 1,700 square metres.
And it will have two X-ray suites, instead of none.
The old emergency room, which opened in 1969, was designed to serve 25,000 patients per year. Right now, it’s getting 50,000 visits annually. The new emerg would have capacity to treat 60,000 patients per year.
If you’ve been at the Misericordia emergency department in the last few years, either as a patient or as someone bringing in a friend or family member for care, you know that this facility is badly overdue. The current waiting room is small, dated and dysfunctional. It’s a miserable place to be when you’re sick or in pain, or when you’re worrying about someone you love.
For staff, the situation isn’t much better. The prospect of having a modern ER, complete with X-ray suites and proper beds under construction before the end of this year certainly sounds like a good thing.
But here’s the bad news. The Misericordia Hospital is getting a brand-new, $65-million emergency department. And why is that bad news, if the old emergency room is so badly needed?
It’s because we’re applying a giant Band-Aid to a badly broken hospital building with no clear plan on where we go from here. No, not a Band-Aid. More like a tourniquet to staunch an arterial bleed.
Yes, the Misericordia ER is broken. But the whole hospital is an outdated mess. Floods. Insect infestations. Small crowded rooms. Failing infrastructure. Over the last years, the province has given Covenant Health, the parallel Catholic health agency that runs the hospital, an additional $26 million to make basic repairs and to pay for basic things like new working elevators and new nurse-call buttons. But again, that was just playing catch-up.
In 2016, my colleague Keith Gerein broke the news that Covenant Health was asking the government for $2.7 billion to build a new 900-bed hospital, west and north of the existing building.
But the province didn’t come up with that money. Instead, it promised the Misericordia just $85 million in capital: $65 million for the emergency department and another $20 million to spend on smaller capital projects. Then the province announced it would be building a new 350- to 500-bed hospital at Ellerslie Road and 127 Street SW instead.
Which is great, if you happen to live in Rutherford, MacEwan or Cavanagh, and not so great if you live in the more populated northwest. But by putting so many resources into the new south hospital, the province has left the Misericordia to languish.
It might have made more sense, instead, to shut the Misericordia down entirely, or turn it into a community health centre and build one big new hospital to serve all of west Edmonton. But the province didn’t go that route.
The good news for Covenant, I guess, is that it won’t lose control of the hospital, which it might have had the province elected to build one big new hospital. That means it can still run the Misericordia according to Catholic values: no abortion, no medical aid in dying, no surgical birth control. The bad news is that Covenant is now stuck with an aging building and no major capital dollars to rebuild or replace it.
So yes. By all means, let’s cheer the prospect of a big new functional emergency room in west Edmonton.
But I worry that a brand spanking new emergency department is going to find itself attached to a failing main hospital building, a structure that’s already on life support with no miracle cure in sight.