Alberta ER plan goes into effect Monday

A plan to deal with overcrowded emergency rooms is set to go into effect on Monday, Alberta Health Services has announced.

Dr. Chris Eagle, AHS’s acting president and CEO, said the protocols lay out clear accountability for how patients should be dealt with during serious bed crunches.

“Everyone from front-line emergency doctors to the CEO has a clear role and clear accountability,” Eagle said Friday.

The new protocol is almost identical to one laid-out last month after health experts met in Edmonton to figure out how to deal with crowded emergency rooms, long waits and increasingly vocal complaints from ER doctors.

The new system kicks in faster, has more triggers, is Alberta wide and can escalate from front line nurses all the way up to the CEO of the health system to make sure action is taken to reduce the number of sick people waiting, or dying, in emergency rooms.

The proposal would see hospitals begin moving patients into other hospital wards or into community care facilities when:

— there are no additional beds in the emergency department to treat very ill people arriving;

— there are seven or fewer ambulances on the road in Edmonton or Calgary;

— the hospital is 100 per cent full;

— the emergency department is 110 per cent full;

— more than five admitted patients in the emergency ward have been waiting more than eight hours for an appropriate bed elsewhere;

— the number of admitted patients filling emergency stretchers because there are no available beds on more appropriate wards exceeds 35 per cent.

Eagle said the protocol is part of an overall plan to address lengthening emergency wait times. That plan includes opening 49 new acute-care beds in Edmonton and another 32 in Calgary over the next three months, on top of 279 already announced. Approximately 1,300 new seniors community beds are also in the works.