On May 8, another patient died waiting in the emergency room for care—this time at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.
This tragic event has only come to light because emergency physicians have spoken out about the overcrowding and capacity challenges at the hospital.
Dr. Warren Thirsk, an emergency medicine physician and section president at the Alberta Medical Association, attributed the death to the deteriorating state of emergency departments in the province. “I’ve said before, publicly, that there have been deaths in the emergency department and deaths in the waiting room due to overcrowding and wait times,” he told CBC News.
In December, another patient died in the waiting room at Grey Nuns Hospital in Edmonton from cardiac arrest. The government subsequently ordered a review into the death, which found overcrowding, lack of capacity, and long wait times at issue.
Dr. Paul Parks, the former president of the Alberta Medical Association’s emergency medicine section, wrote a letter to the provincial government in January detailing examples of six additional deaths and 30 cases that almost ended in death.
ER and hospital admission wait times have increased dramatically
These tragic deaths are not isolated incidents. They are associated with the systematic underfunding and under-resourcing of Alberta’s hospitals by the provincial government.
Emergency room wait times are a canary in the coal mine for health care system performance.
Publicly available data reported by the Canadian Institute for Health Information show that the maximum wait times for 90 per cent of patients increased by 86 per cent between 2020-21 and 2024-25 (Table 1)—from 2.9 hours to 5.4 hours. (2024-25 is the most recent publicly available reporting year available. The 90th percentile of the wait-time indicators represent the maximum length of time that 90 per cent of patients waited.)
In the Calgary Zone, ER assessment maximum wait times increased by 111 per cent, by 89 per cent in the Edmonton Zone, and by 90 per cent in the South Zone, which includes Lethbridge and Medicine Hat.
The other important indicator is how long it takes for patients in the ER to be admitted to an inpatient bed. If patients cannot be admitted to the hospital due to a lack of inpatient beds, it leads to overcrowding and long wait times in the ER.
In 2020-21, 90 per cent of patients waited a maximum of 26.2 hours for hospital admission, which increased to 37.3 hours in 2024-25—or by 42 per cent (Table 2). Hospital admission wait-times jumped the most over this period in the North Zone (79 per cent) and the Edmonton Zone (72 per cent)—where these two patients have died waiting for care.
Alberta hospitals are being starved of needed funding
Between 2014 and 2023 (the most recent data available), provincial real per capita hospital spending in Alberta declined by four per cent, from $2,252 to $2,169 (Table 3). Alberta was the only large province to experience real, per capita spending cuts over these years.
That means provincial funding has not kept pace with population growth and inflation. Alberta is not providing sufficient hospital funding to meet the needs of the population, as the tragic ER deaths vividly demonstrate.
The other larger provinces—B.C., Ontario, and Quebec—increased real per capita hospital spending over this period. The only other provinces that saw spending declines were P.E.I. and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Alberta has been an outlier over the last decade, and the latest provincial budget appears to solidify Alberta’s status by failing to provide the funding necessary to increase capacity and reduce wait times.
These tragic deaths are symptoms of a much larger political failure to meet the acute care needs of Alberta’s population.
The foremost goal of the provincial government should be the proper funding of Alberta’s public hospitals in order to prevent additional tragedies.
