Patients detail ‘disaster’ inside Alberta emergency departments

Sick with pneumonia and a blood infection, Paula Krawiec said her 77-year-old mother waited 24 hours to see a doctor in the emergency department at an Edmonton-area hospital last month.

Over in Calgary, it took 24 hours for Colleen Whitley’s 74-year-old mother — who suffered broken ribs and vertebrae fractures after a fall and was also sick with the flu and pneumonia — to get admitted, said Whitley, her caregiver.

Edmonton father Aaron Currie, 44, said he left the waiting room of a hospital without being seen after six hours of chest tightness and shortness of breath mid-December.

“I feel like this health system has failed us completely,” Currie said.

Stories of exceedingly long wait times at Alberta hospitals have emerged since 44-year-old Prashant Sreekumar died after waiting nearly eight hours in an Edmonton emergency department with chest pain in late December.

The Canadian Press spoke with several patients who detailed “disastrous” conditions — a line just to get into the emergency department snaking down the hallway; three beds squeezed into one hospital room; of giving up and going home without even their vitals checked.

Front line workers say these experiences are symptoms of a large-scale issue that has been brewing for years, tied to inadequate staffing and resources, and a siloed system that is cracking under pressure.

“How many people, really, how many more need to die before anything is done?” Krawiec said.

THE CRISIS

Alberta’s hospital crisis has been years in the making, said Dr. Paul Parks, an emergency medicine physician in Medicine Hat.

And now, it’s boiling over, he said.

He points to a number of overlapping issues: a nurse and doctor shortage, a failure to co-ordinate care across the province, a booming aging population with complex diseases, and not enough new infrastructure to meet the demand.

“You take a huge demand and then you have a system where, for example, in Edmonton, the last hospital they built was in 1988. So we’re trying to take care of a 2026 patient population with a bed-base of 1988,” said Parks, also president-elect of the Alberta Medical Association’s section of emergency medicine.

Then came the flu season, which Parks described as “a 1,000-pound weight that landed on top of the broken camel’s back.”

Parks sent a letter to the provincial government earlier this month on behalf of emergency room doctors across Alberta to illuminate the dire state. “Our hallways and waiting rooms have become death zones,” he wrote.

Hospital and Surgical Health Services Minister Matt Jones has said a new triage system will be rolled out Sunday in Edmonton and Calgary emergency departments to better expedite care.

An Acute Care Alberta communications adviser said Tuesday that the health agency is co-ordinating a system-wide response to create capacity and relieve “significant strain,” including expediting discharges, repatriations, maximizing acute and continuing care capacity, and opening additional overcapacity spaces in rural sites.

The spokesperson for Acute Care Alberta, which oversees emergency and in-patient care for hospitals across the province, said they can’t speak to individual patient concerns.

Covenant Health, which oversees Grey Nuns, also said they can’t comment on patient care due to privacy concerns, but said they prioritize patients with the greatest need.

‘A DISASTER’

Krawiec said her mother Dianne Fedec had trouble catching her breath and looked unwell on Christmas Day after opening gifts with family in Spruce Grove, west of Edmonton.

Fedec has a lung condition that limits her airflow, and her oxygen levels were low.

Krawiec took her to the closest hospital, WestView Health Centre.

She said they waited six hours and left without being seen by a health provider.

The next day, Fedec’s oxygen levels dropped even lower, and she had pain in her chest and rib cage area, said Krawiec, adding she called an ambulance, this time to Sturgeon Community Hospital, closer to Edmonton.

There, Krawiec said Fedec waited on a stretcher for more than five hours before getting a bed in the emergency department, and learning she had pneumonia in both lungs and a blood infection.

She said it wasn’t until the next day, 24 hours after arrival, that her mother saw a doctor.

“If I would have said, ‘You know what, mom, go back up to bed, you’ll sleep it off,’ who’s to know what would have happened? She could have died,” Krawiec said, speaking on behalf of her mother, who is still having trouble breathing.

Once admitted, her mother was squeezed as the third patient into a two-bed hospital room for more than a week, Krawiec said. She didn’t have a call bell, and instead was given a hand-held metal service bell, like at a reception desk.

Krawiec said she complained but was told the rest of the floor was full of flu patients.

“This isn’t health care. This is like a disaster,” Krawiec said.

NO BEDS

On Jan. 13, Whitley’s mother Cheryl Pyne passed out in the shower. Whitley said an ambulance took her to South Health Campus in Calgary with broken ribs and vertebrae compression fractures.

Tests also showed she had pneumonia and influenza A.

“They were going to admit her because she was in a lot of pain,” Whitley said, adding that her mother also needed oxygen because of the flu and pneumonia, “but they had no bed for her.”

Whitley was grateful that her mother at least had a gurney in a little cubicle in the emergency department until she was admitted the next day.

She’s been at the hospital ever since, which is why her daughter is speaking on her behalf.

Over a month earlier, Whitley said she went to the same hospital for her own emergency, after feeling pain “like childbirth” in her back, and vomiting so violently she burst a blood vessel in her neck. She recounted waiting for 12 hours, hunched over in a chair, rocking herself to soothe the excruciating pain of what turned out to be gallstones stuck in her bile duct.

Whitley, 52, said she can’t help but put herself in the shoes of someone her mother’s age, hoping things improve by then.

“Although, maybe they won’t.”

LIKE RUSH HOUR

Aaron Currie arrived at the Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton with chest tightness and shortness of breath in mid-December.

The left side of the 44-year-old’s body was numb and he said his mouth was drooping. His complexion looked grey and he couldn’t register what people were saying.

Over nearly six hours, he said he witnessed a line snake outside of the emergency room. Hospital workers put a rope in the hallway, like at an airport, to create some order.

Inside, he said it became claustrophobic and he felt entirely forgotten, despite regularly going up to the triage nurse.

“I just remember being next to people and you can feel their breath on the back of your neck. It was so close. It’s like being in a transit bus at rush hour,” he said.

Currie said he felt like he was losing consciousness and decided to call an ambulance from Grey Nuns to the University of Alberta Hospital.

There, he said he got in right away, and learned that he had a brain aneurysm, which was slowing his heart. He was treated and said he returned home a few days later, though he’s still unsettled.

“I almost died there and two weeks later, somebody did die,” he said, speaking of Sreekumar, who died at Grey Nuns on Dec. 22.

Currie said he has a message for the person in power whose job it is to run the hospital: “Start treating patients with dignity because this is unacceptable.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 28, 2026.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

Hannah Alberga, The Canadian Press