Albertans aren’t waiting as long to get hip, knee and other surgeries this year compared to last, but progress on speeding up the length of time sick patients spend in Edmonton and Calgary emergency wards before getting treated and admitted to hospital has flatlined, according to new data.
Alberta Health Services released its second quarter performance report Thursday, measuring more than 50 medical system indicators from July to September, 2013.
While many waits remain weeks longer than the province’s targets, health superboard boss Dr. Chris Eagle pointed to improvements in 34 of the goals.
Wait times for hip replacement surgery are at their lowest in two years, at 35 weeks compared to 41 weeks last year. Knee surgeries have also seen shorter waits, down to 43 weeks, while patients who need cataract procedures spent roughly 30 weeks on wait lists.
“For the most part, our wait times are moving in the right direction: downward,” Eagle said an AHS board meeting in Edmonton.
The medical authority chief executive acknowledged, however, that ER woes remain as the province grapples with seeing more patients each year in the already busy wards.
Two years ago, AHS committed to a benchline of having emergency department patients seen, treated and admitted to hospital within eight hours.
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According to the performance report, that goal was met with 47 per cent of patients so far this year at the province’s 15 busiest hospitals, compared to 46 per cent last year.
Calgary met the eight-hour emergency department goal 48 per cent of the time in the same period, compared to Edmonton’s 37 per cent.
Eagle said hospitals in Alberta’s two biggest cities have seen roughly 10 per cent increases in patient volumes in their ERs annually for the past three years – a trend causing the health superboard “considerable concern.”
“We’re obviously keeping up with the flow and patients are being seen appropriately,” said Eagle, noting times have improved in the last two years.
“We’re looking at everything we possibly can to decrease that relentless increase in volume,” Eagle told reporters in Edmonton.
That includes putting home-care nurses in the ER to detour patients away from hospital beds if outside care is more appropriate, and working with the province’s primary care providers, Eagle said. AHS has also hired more than 400 front-line health professionals to tackle increasing ER demand, he said at the board meeting.
Wildrose health critic Heather Forsyth said the government’s record on wait times is a litany of failure on “some of the crucial ones that keep the system from bottlenecking.”
Little progress will be made on the emergency room issue unless the government properly addresses long-term care and ensures that seniors who are in acute-care beds are moved into long-term care nursing beds, she said.
The performance report indicates that 557 elderly and frail patients are waiting in hospital beds for long-term care or supportive living spaces. The province’s goal is 363.
Liberal MLA David Swann said the lack of progress on surgical and ER wait times stems from huge problems within the primary, long-term and home-care systems in the province.
“The prevention side we continually neglect at tremendous cost to our system,” he said.
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