Great success
Re: “With failures like this, who needs successes?” Don Braid, Opinion, June 8.
As an emergency physician, I have been trying to improve these wait times for a decade. Long waits for in-patient hospital beds lead to emergency access block (“overcrowding”); they compromise care for sick people, and they demoralize emergency department staff.
Don Braid is correct. Our emergency waits are still too long; we have not met our targets yet and we have to do better. But the truth is, we are doing much better. A decade-long trend of increasing wait times was reversed in 2011. Emergency patients are waiting less now than they did in previous years.
As an emergency health services researcher, 2011 was my best year ever. Why? Because Alberta emergency department wait times have improved so dramatically that it is big news everywhere.
A month ago, I was invited to speak at the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine scientific meetings in Chicago, where improvements in Alberta wait times made it as the No. 1 plenary presentation — the biggest news in emergency medicine research in North America for the last year. Last week, I presented the same data in Ontario at the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians’ annual scientific meetings and had a similar reception.
I have been invited to present our data at the international emergency medicine meetings in Dublin, Ireland, at the end of June.
Ironically, what is recognized as a huge success in international emergency health research circles is portrayed as a huge failure in the Calgary media. This is demoralizing for everyone in our system who has worked so hard to achieve these improvements.
Grant Innes, MD, Calgary Grant Innes is professor of emergency medicine at the
University of Calgary and department head of emergency
medicine for the Calgary zone.