Patients face longer waits in Edmonton emergency rooms

Patients arriving at Edmonton-area emergency rooms are seeing worsening delays for an initial doctor’s assessment and to be admitted to a bed, as the capital region’s hospitals continue to lag the rest of the province.

The findings were revealed in newly published data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information that tracks the annual performance of provinces, health regions and individual facilities on a number of fronts.

The new statistics, unveiled Thursday, include the total time that patients who need to be admitted spend in the emergency department before being transferred to a hospital ward.

According to the data, 90 per cent of such patients in the Edmonton area last year got a bed within 38.1 hours of initially registering — a significant jump from the 32.6 hours recorded the year before, though still better than highs posted in 2014-15.

The province as a whole recorded a much more modest increase last year to 28.3 hours of waiting from 26.9 hours, while the Calgary region’s rate increased only 30 minutes to 28 hours even.

The only other provinces included in the statistics were Ontario and British Columbia, which posted rates of 31.3 hours and 42.7 hours, respectively.

“Achieving timely admissions for all (emergency department) patients who need to spend the night in hospital is an area where there have been persistent challenges over the past 10 years, and we’re seeing that for some people in Canada the wait is getting even longer,” Greg Webster, the health institute’s director of acute and ambulatory care information services, said in a statement.

Wait times in Edmonton’s emergency departments have lagged their counterparts in the rest of Alberta for years, but the institute’s new data suggests the gap is widening somewhat. Broken down to the level of individual facilities, the statistics show three Edmonton-area emergency departments recorded the longest wait times in the province last year to get admitted from the emergency department.

Health leaders have said several initiatives are underway to address hospital overcrowding.