CHAT News File Photo

By Gates Guarin

Staff vacancies, absentee numbers are at record highs, says city doctor

Jul 6, 2022 | 2:45 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – Several emergency rooms across Canada have been forced to close their doors or modify their hours, some as close as Bassano, which announced last month it would be closing its emergency department on most evenings throughout the summer.

These closures have largely been attributed to staffing shortages, affecting not only nurses and doctors but health-care workers across the board.

Emergency room physician Dr. Paul Parks has witnessed these shortages first-hand, saying staff vacancies and absentee numbers are at record highs.

“On a daily basis now, it’s quite regular that in the hospital wards, for example, they’re working at two-thirds or three-quarters staff in the hospital wards,” the Medicine Hat doctor says. “So they’re taking care of a lot of sicker patients, more patients per nurse, and they’re struggling. And of course, that backs up into the emerg department.”

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Parks, who is also president, emergency medicine for the Alberta Medical Association, says burnout from two and a half years of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, limited patient capacity and changes to the health system brought on by the provincial government have caused health-care workers to take time away to care for themselves or their own families.

He adds the shortages are causing a backlog affecting emergency room waits and EMS response times and says Hatters and Albertans should be concerned.

“You get that trickle-down effect of, if rural emerg departments are under-resourced and can’t take care of the patients they normally would, then those patients, they don’t just go away, they have to go somewhere else. So it’ll mean Brooks gets busier, and then of course Medicine Hat gets busier.”

Parks says in order to curb these shortages, short-term capacity levelling and long-term investment back into health-care workers will need to occur.