Doctors: Red Deer’s hospital, “on the brink of collapse”

“We need immediate measures to be taken to prevent this,” they add.

READ THE FULL LETTER BELOW

Minister Copping was in Red Deer Thursday to meet with area physicians and health care staff, seven months after the province committed $1.8 billion to expansion of the RDRHC.

Dr. Kym Jim, an internal medicine specialist at RDRHC, was in the ‘community engagement’ meeting and says it’s a positive thing the minister is taking the time to listen.

However, he agrees the situation is about as dire as the doctors’ letter makes it out to be.

“Speaking on behalf of the Society for Hospital Expansion in Central Alberta (SHECA), the surgeons’ points of view certainly reflect the general crisis that is occurring in Red Deer. We simply can’t get the work done. Every day, we’re sending patients out of ER who are citizens of Red Deer to outlying hospitals,” says Dr. Jim.

“Across the board, health care workers here are punching above their weight, doing their utmost and are providing the best care with what they have available. Documentation will show we do provide great care once you get into the system, but the problem is getting into it, waiting in ER and being forced to travel afar to access the system.”

That problem was evident Thursday morning (Sept. 29) when at about 2:30 a.m., the posted wait time in the ER was 14 hours and 56 minutes.

Dr. Jim says that may not have been the case for everyone, but it does mean at least one person waited that long.

He also heard firsthand accounts overnight that there was at one point a lineup of at least 10 ambulances waiting to offload.

Unfortunately, Jim says he knows nothing of plans to actually get shovels in the ground on hospital expansion.

“Over the years, no one has wanted to cause alarm. The data the public sees is accurate, but what’s missing sometimes is the context of what it’s really like on the frontline. Folks don’t see the suffering and chaos behind the data,” says Jim. “Each day, our staff’s stress level goes up and the data doesn’t capture that.”

Jim, who’s been working at RDRHC for 24 years, says not in his wildest dreams would he have thought this would be the state of the hospital.

“I don’t think anyone ever imagined these wait times or emergency backlogs, and from a physician’s perspective, I never imagined we’d see the type, quality and volume of care we deliver diminish instead of increase over time,” he says. “We’ve seen services we used to have disappear, and programs that should’ve been here 15 or 20 years ago still not here, and we have no idea how to get them.

“When I started, could I have imagined we’d one day be sending patients to outlying hospitals? Never.”

Meantime, the Opposition NDP’s Health Critic, MLA David Shepherd, says the doctors’ letter showcases the pressure on surgery capacity in Red Deer.

“While UCP is hell bent on building more private clinics, there are fewer surgeries getting done in the hospitals we already have,” said Shepherd.

“The [Red Deer] letter highlights how a loss of anesthesiologists and nurses has led to not performing as many surgeries as they should. This has caused some patients to consider paying exorbitant amounts of money to have their surgery done in the United States or other countries, and patients waiting so long for elective surgeries that they now require emergency surgery instead.”

Steve Buick, Health Ministry Press Secretary, deferred to AHS to comment on Red Deer-specific issues.

He says the NDP’s claims that surgery volumes are above pre-pandemic levels is false, further calling the Opposition’s claims “nonsense.”

“The total [surgical] waiting list most recently was slightly under 73,000, compared to a peak of over 81,000 last fall and about 68,000 in early 2020 prior to the pandemic,” says Buick. “The pandemic has caused backlogs of surgery and other care across Canada, but we’re making progress and we’re in a better position than the other provinces in general.”

In a statement to rdnewsNOW, Alberta Health Services says the wait time as of 4 p.m. on Sept. 29 is about 3.5 hours, adding that it acknowledges the exceptionally busy state of the emergency department.

“The site is using a range of measures to help manage patient demand, including discharging patients with appropriate home supports, managing surgery patients at home instead of in hospital as appropriate, and balancing admissions with other sites in the Zone,” the statement says.

“At this time, a number of rural sites close to Red Deer are also experiencing an increase in patient demand, which means that patients may be transferred to other Central Zone sites to create capacity for those in need of the specialized care RDRHC provides. This helps ensure that as medicine, surgery and ICU patients recover and their care needs lessen, they can be transferred to an appropriate hospital or unit, freeing up space for new admissions.”

AHS adds that it knows receiving care away from one’s home community can cause added stress.

“We will ensure patients get the support they need, and efforts will be made to attempt to minimize the distance between transfer sites when possible.”

AHS says at this time, there are no planned surgical diversions, and that it is working on multiple fronts to address staffing vacancies as well as on-call schedule gaps.

Job offers have been extended to two new anesthesiologists in the last week, and two more positions are being posted, AHS adds.

AHS says that in its recruitment efforts, it has done the following:

implemented an income guarantee for anesthesiologists.
reworked the OR schedule at RDRHC with input from the anesthesiology team to help reduce nighttime on-call levels to support work-life balance.
provided signing bonuses, reimbursement for relocation and paid site tours.
collaborated with rural surgical sites in Central Zone to help increase their capacity for emergency cases to take some pressure off RDRHC.
adopted Clinical Assistants (CA) as part of the anesthesia care team. There are currently two CAs supporting anesthesia with another three positions to be hired into.
Provided teams the opportunity to bring in General Practitioners with training and experience in anesthesia (GPAs) to support the department.

“We stand by our promise to Albertans,” says Buick, “to ensure every patient who needs scheduled surgery receives it within a clinically appropriate time.”

by Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

Doctors: Red Deer’s hospital, “on the brink of collapse”

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