Alberta shows a lack of improvement when it comes to emergency room wait times: report

Alberta’s emergency room wait times are just as long as they were last year for the median patient, according to a new report by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI).

The median Albertan spent three hours and 48 minutes in the emergency room in 2024 — an increase of 54 minutes since 2020. According to the report, the Edmonton region had the highest median wait time at five hours and 54 minutes, followed by the Calgary region at four hours and 42 minutes.

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Krystle Wittevrongel, the institute’s director of research, said over the past five years all 10 provinces have seen an increase in wait times.

“Alberta didn’t increase much from last year, but compared to the beginning of the five-year period, there was an increase of 54 minutes compared to the beginning of the period (2020), but it was zero minutes from last year. So we don’t have much change, but it’s hard to look at it just from one year’s perspective,” Wittevrongel said.

MEI obtained the data through freedom of information requests from all 10 provinces for the 2024-2025 fiscal year. Wittevrongel said despite getting both the average and median wait times, they chose to go with the median statistic since it was a better indicator when accounting for extreme outliers where some people may wait for very little or a long time, which can skew the average.

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This means 50 per cent of patients wait longer and 50 per cent wait less time than the median.

When creating the report, Wittevrongel said her team looked at the time when a patient is triaged to the physician’s initial assessment and the total length of stay from triage until they are discharged from the emergency room. She said they mainly focused on the length of stay since it is more indicative of a hospital’s overall operation such as bed shortages.

According to the report, the University of Alberta Hospital had the longest visits in Alberta with a median stay of eight hours and 30 minutes in 2024, followed by the Misericordia Community Hospital at seven hours and 54 minutes and the Royal Alexandra Hospital at seven hours and 42 minutes.

“Almost four hours for a length of stay doesn’t seem that high, but it is quite high when we look at other countries and I really think that we’ve just gotten to a place where we accept long wait times and something has to change,” Wittevrongel said.

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“We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over. It’s obviously not working anywhere in the country, because every single province is having these same issues. So we need to look at things a little bit more creatively and find alternative ways of doing things if this is a priority, and if we want to actually increase access to care for Albertans.”

The report recommends implementing immediate care centres following a model in France which is similar to urgent care centres but instead caters to the “missing middle” for patients that don’t need an emergency room but are in need of a family doctor or primary care.

When asked if she thinks the province’s refocusing of the health care system and appointing four health ministers instead of one would help with wait times, she said if localized decision making is a priority, then she could see this as a positive potential for the ongoing issue.

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Postmedia has reached out to the province for comment.

ctran@postmedia.com

X:@kccindytran

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