The Emergency Physicians Association is claiming that wait times in Alberta emergency rooms have soared.
Close to 200 health care professionals and administrators gathered in Edmonton to address ER wait times that at times, can average six hours.
"The crisis that we face when it's at its worse is the fact that we can't get our patients from the waiting room into the emergency department," said Dr. Felix Soibelman, with the Edmonton Emergency Physicians Association.
Ed Stelmach personally asked Alberta Health to look into wait times, so now the province has created a new emergency department team.
Stelmach admitted the province should have looked at the issue earlier, given the fact that Alberta spends the most per person for health care in Canada.
Other provinces have already established an ER waiting time benchmark of four hours, but Alberta Health will not give time lines of when changes will be announced or even if those changes would include benchmarks.
With files from Kevin Armstrong
