Ballooning Alberta ER waiting rooms ‘quite regular’ and ‘deeply troubling’
Global News
More and more Albertans are having to wait longer and longer to get care at emergency departments or from EMS, as citizens and workers have to navigate a new reality.
A late afternoon visit to the emergency department at Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital turned into an all-night affair for Alberta mother Karen Khurshed, and sadly, she’s not alone.
“My son was sick – a cold or flu – and he started to cough up blood. And so we thought that was a pretty emergent kind of situation,” Khurshed said.
“He has asthma. Something that was in the back of our mind, ‘Could this be something more serious?’ Yeah, something we needed to look at.”
She took her two-year-old boy to the Stollery at around 5 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon – there was standing room only in the emergency department.
“I’m in this waiting room, and I’m feeling this stress from these parents. I feel that same way, but I’m feeling everyone else’s stress. And these kids that they’re trying to get to sleep on their laps and everyone coughing,” she said.
Khurshed recalls feeling relief being able to wait in the foyer, with some separation from an overcrowded waiting room of children and parents trying to find some comfort and rest.
“I’m like, ‘Is it because I’m feeling stressed or is it because everyone’s stressed and I’m feeling everyone’s stress,’ you know? And I kept going back and forth into the waiting room when I went to the washroom, would get a snack, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re all feeling so super-stressed.’”
Before leaving for the hospital, Khurshed checked the estimated wait times on the Alberta Health Services website: it was six hours for the Stollery.