‘Probably the biggest issue that we face every day’: ER deaths national concern, doctor says

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This article was published 03/03/2023 (956 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hospital staff across the country have been raising the alarm about the number of people who die in ERs while waiting for treatment, says the president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.

Among millions of hospital emergency departments visits each year, the Canadian Institute for Health Information recorded 18,492 ending in death (after waiting a median of 96 minutes) in 2021-22 — a slight increase from 18,102 in 2020-21.

However, the data doesn’t pinpoint how many of those ER patients had yet to receive initial triage or treatment, nor does it examine how sick those patients were when they arrived at hospital.

Earlier this week, a male patient died while waiting in a hallway at the Health Sciences Centre emergency department in Winnipeg. The death is now the subject of a critical incident investigation.

The man had been brought in by EMS and was triaged, but his condition got worse within an hour of arriving in the ER and was later declared dead, HSC leaders have stated.

Such deaths are a longstanding concern in all provinces, said Dr. Michael Howlett, president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.

It’s a systemic problem that has roots in chronic lack of investment in care for the elderly, he said, and a failure to plan for an aging population of Baby Boomers.

“This is probably the biggest issue that we face every day — is the fear that because of short staffing and because of the large number of people who are admitted to hospital but can’t get a hospital bed and are being housed in the emergency department, that the departments are crowded and the staff are overwhelmed with patients to the point where we’re always afraid that we’re not going to get to someone in time,” Howlett said Friday, speaking by phone after an ER shift in the Oshawa, Ont., area.

“We’ve been trying to point this out for a decade or more,” he said. “So the fact that it’s happening now could have been preventable with attention to these problems when the concerns were (first) being raised.”

At any given hospital in the country, an average of 10 to 25 per cent of beds are occupied by patients who need long-term care but can’t access it, Howlett said.

The lack of long-term care has ripple effects throughout hospitals, and is part of the reason for widespread backlogs in ERs. The longer admitted patients wait in an ER without being transferred to a ward to receive treatment, the more likely they are to die, he said.

“This is well-known. It’s not just a concern, it’s a reality. And it causes no end of grief to us — nurses and physicians — worrying about that when we’re at work.”

Howlett urged provincial and federal politicians to “stop thinking about the next election” and start planning for the future with targeted investments in health care.

It’s “cruel and unkind” not to prioritize care for the elderly, he said. “We can’t let health care and long-term care fail for the very people that made our society what it is.”

katie.may@winnipegfreepress.com