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By Teagan Rasche

Overflowing ICU impacts care for ‘every single sick person in Alberta’

Sep 23, 2021 | 5:20 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – The overflowing ICU in the Medicine Hat Regional Hospital is forcing some patients to be transferred to other wards.

Dr. Paul Parks, an emergency room physician at the hospital, says the numbers go up each day, straining the health-care system and resources.

Parks says more and more the patients being admitted are younger, even some children. He says the patients who are really sick are unvaccinated.

Through extraordinary measures, like two patients per room, more ICU beds are added. But Parks says eventually they will run out of health-care workers to staff the overflow.

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Nurses from other wards are being assigned to the ICU, leaving other departments understaffed.

“This will impact our ability to care for every single sick person in Alberta,” Parks said. “Anyone that’s getting strokes, heart attacks, motor vehicle collisions, regular infections that aren’t COVID, it impacts our ability to be able to admit them and then transfer them to higher levels of care and to give them the highest level of standard of care that we normally do.”

Parks says the system is stretched to the absolute max, but if you’re sick, still go to the hospital as doctors are still able to take care of all Albertans.