Doctor testifies ER staff told to bump VIP
ER physician fears inquiry’s focus too narrow
Dr. Paul Parks, an emergency room doctor in Medicine Hat, told a public inquiry Wednesday that staff at a crowded Edmonton hospital refused a request to bump a “VIP” patient up the queue.
Parks told inquiry commissioner John Vertes that the order came from a University of Alberta hospital on-call executive, but the executive and the VIP weren’t named.
I understand there was a repeated call where the gist of the conversation was ... ‘What the heck are you guys doing down there. Why is that VIP still in the waiting room?’ DR. PAUL PARKS
Emergency department staff at a crowded Edmonton hospital refused a request to bump a “VIP” patient up the queue, a public inquiry heard Wednesday.
Dr. Paul Parks, an ER doctor in Medicine Hat, testified before Commissioner John Vertes Wednesday that the order came from a University of Alberta hospital on-call executive in November 2007.
The executive and the VIP weren’t named at the inquiry.
Parks said he was made aware by staff working that night in the Edmonton hospital that the on-call executive indicated “there was a VIP in the waiting room, and that VIP should be moved into an emergency department bed immediately and be taken care of.”
ER staff determined the prominent patient wasn’t critically ill, then declined to help the VIP skip the line for a bed, said Parks.
A second call from the executive after that “was definitely not friendly,” Parks said.
“I understand there was a repeated call where the gist of the conversation was in the sense of, ‘What the heck are you guys doing down there. Why is that VIP still in the waiting room?’”
Parks and a senior emergency department doctor outlined the allegation in a November 2007 letter sent to senior administrators warning them about growing pressures severely straining the emergency ward.
On Wednesday, Parks said the VIP case happened amid an emergency department logjam.
He said he spoke out because he was frustrated over cases of patients languishing hours longer than they should in the ER. Days before the VIP request, 39 of 42 emergency beds were occupied by sick patients waiting to get into hospital units.
The waiting room was full of undiagnosed patients waiting for care several hours longer than the accepted protocol, he said. But beds in hospital wards were already filled, which meant patients who turned up to the ER — the hospital’s front doors — piled up without being treated.
The public inquiry, which began hearing from witnesses on Monday, is looking into whether improper, preferential access to the health-care system is occurring in Alberta.
Health superboard executives have testified that requests for expedited care for prominent patients happened in the system in the past under the nine former regional medical authorities, but didn’t provide specific cases.
Parks, Medicine Hat’s chief of emergency medicine, said he didn’t experience other examples of alleged improper preferential access request.
He said his emergency department group discussed queuejumping after the VIP request and reached a consensus not to budge from established triage protocols — treating patients based on how sick they are.
In an interview Wednesday, Parks said he’s concerned the inquiry’s narrow focus on queue-jumping misses the broader problem of why the lines were so long in the first place.
“Why was the queue so intolerable? It was inordinate, it was too long,” he said.
At the height of Alberta’s ER crisis, Parks helped document hundreds of “sub-optimal outcomes” among U of A hospital patients.
The cases, along with Parks’ pleas to politicians and health officials to address the ER crisis, were leaked to the media in 2010.
Since then, some improvements have been made, although the ERs aren’t meeting targets put in place by the province.
Liberal Leader Raj Sherman, meanwhile, says while he was the go-to guy to get answers on healthcare problems when he was part of the government, he was never a “fix-it” man to help VIPs jump waiting lists.
Sherman responded Wednesday to testimony a day earlier from former Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett, who said the MLA was one of the politicians who gave him grief for eliminating “Mr. FixIt” positions from the health superboard.
Sherman, who at one time was associate health minister for the governing Tories and is also an emergency room doctor, is slated to testify next week.
The Liberal leader said he’s not surprised that Duckett remembered him because Sherman was the associate health minister at the time as well as a doctor and a person people could turn to for answers when they were stonewalled by bureaucrats.
“There was an absolute need for someone to help Albertans navigate the system when communication (got) dropped, when (someone’s) surgery (got) cancelled for the third time.”
But Sherman said that’s where the help ended.
“(Helping obtain) preferential access? Never.”