Emergency doctor describes health care breakdown at fatality inquiry for man who died waiting in Edmonton ER

A doctor testifying at an inquiry into the death of a man in an Edmonton emergency department says stories like Prashant Sreekumar’s are more common than the public is aware of amid a rolling “disaster” in emergency medicine.

Dr. Warren Thirsk took the stand Wednesday in the fatality inquiry into Sreekumar’s Dec. 22, 2025, death at Grey Nuns Hospital. Sreekumar, a 44-year-old father of three, had come to the hospital’s emergency department complaining of chest pain and died of aortic dissection after an eight-hour wait.

“It is well-known within my profession that this is happening much more frequently than people are aware of,” Thirsk said of deaths in Alberta emergency departments. Patient confidentiality, however, prevents doctors from speaking publicly about most cases. 

“The ability for us to talk about these cases is very limited,” he said. “What makes Mr. Sreekumar’s tragedy different is his family spoke out immediately.” 

Thirsk, a physician for 25 years, said the crisis in emergency departments has been decades in the making and has steadily worsened over his career.

He said in the 2000s, a four-hour emergency room wait was considered “horrifically bad.” Now, a three-hour wait is considered “fast” for most patients.

Thirsk recently heard about a patient who waited 100 hours — about four days — before being seen.

“I show up for a shift and I try not to look at all the pain and suffering around me,” he said. “Because it is unmanageable.” 

Sreekumar’s death is being examined by a fatality inquiry, which began earlier this week and will continue later this year.

Held before a Court of Justice judge, fatality inquiries aim to determine the circumstances of specific deaths and produce recommendations for preventing similar losses of life.

Thirsk, an emergency physician at Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital, is past president of the Alberta Medical Association’s section of emergency medicine. He testified broadly about the conditions facing patients and health care workers in Alberta hospitals.

Aortic dissection is difficult to diagnose because many less deadly ailments involve chest pain, Thirsk said. It is nonetheless toward the top of the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS), meaning the patient should be seen within 0-15 minutes.

Nevertheless, it’s common for patients at the top of the CTAS scale to spend hours sitting in hospital hallways, Thirsk said.

“We’re not doing our job. We just can’t do it, because we haven’t been given the number of people or the care spaces to do it.” 

Just days after the deadly fire in Wainwright that flooded Edmonton with burn victims, Thirsk said emergency departments are still capable of “heroics” when the need arises.

“The whole city responded to that disaster, but in a way that is completely unsustainable on a day-to-day basis,” said Thirsk, who was among those who volunteered to come in and treat wounded soldiers. .

The University of Alberta hospital, for example, stopped taking ambulances that night, and ripples from that are still being felt from across the system, he said. 

Thirsk said if “disaster” is defined as health care needs outstripping the available resources, “the patients in our waiting rooms are facing a disaster in our emergency departments every day.”

In Thirsk’s view, the problem is shortages — of patient beds, doctors and the health professionals who assist them.

He traced the problem to the 1990s, when the Barer–Stoddart Report recommended cutting medical school enrolments in response to forecasts Canada would face a doctor surplus. The medical school class ahead of Thirsk graduated 250 physicians, while his was limited to just 100, a trend that played out in “pretty much every medical school across Canada,” he said.

Thirsk said medical school enrolments need to double “today” for Alberta to reach sustainable doctor levels a decade from now.

Looking abroad isn’t a solution either.

“We’ve essentially exhausted the world’s supply of ready-made physicians to come to Canada,” he said. 

According to Thirsk, Edmonton is currently looking to hire 30 emergency department physicians and has received fewer than 30 applications. Other centres have the same problem, and rural emergency departments are worse off, with many being forced to close due to lack of staff.

Many of his younger colleagues are already looking for a way out.

“They don’t think they can do it much longer, because the moral injury is so great,” he said. “They can’t sleep at night.”

The story has been the same for nurses and other health professionals, many of whom find themselves turned away from programs despite pent up demand within the system, Thirsk said.

“We basically are not letting people into these professions.”   

Thirsk also called out the UCP government for cancelling plans for a new hospital in south Edmonton, which would have been the city’s first new hospital since the 1990s. In that time, the city’s population has doubled.

Thirsk said Alberta’s ratio of hospital beds per capita is now on par with countries like Mexico and Costa Rica.

Toward the end of Wednesday’s hearing, Justice Randal Brandt asked if there was any “low-hanging fruit” that could immediately improve conditions in emergency departments.

Thirsk said “low-hanging fruit” has been a “fantasy” of health care administrators his entire career. As far as he’s concerned, “that was picked long ago.” 

The inquiry is scheduled to run through Friday, before resuming Dec. 14-18.

@jonnywakefield.bsky.social

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