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Prashanth Sreekumar’s wife Niharika Sreekumar in their home in Edmonton.Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
On the day Prashant Sreekumar died, he slid out of bed early to surprise his wife, Niharika, with a mug of chai. He used ChatGPT to make sure he did it right.
Mr. Sreekumar, an accountant, left for work later that morning, three days before Christmas. But a few hours later he called Ms. Sreekumar to say his chest hurt and he was losing vision in his left eye. A client drove him to Grey Nuns Community Hospital in southeast Edmonton.
Mr. Sreekumar waited more than eight hours in the emergency room as the pain grew to be unbearable, Ms. Sreekumar said. He received an initial assessment that showed heightened blood pressure, but doctors concluded that he didn’t need immediate care. He could barely speak, and he threw up several times.
When he was finally called after 8 p.m., no beds were available, but hospital staff brought him into the treatment area, Ms. Sreekumar said. He collapsed about a minute after walking through the door.
“I thought he was fainting, but actually he was dying,” she said.
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In a video shared widely on social media, Ms. Sreekumar voiced her anger: ‘All of Grey Nuns hospital have basically killed my husband.’Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
The 44-year-old father of three’s death on Dec. 22 has underlined frustrations about overcrowded emergency rooms in Alberta and across the country, and has quickly become an international news story.
Emergency departments in Canada continue to be bogged down by lengthy waiting times, now exacerbated by the continuing flu season. Billions of dollars have been poured into health care, and governments have tried, with varying degrees of success, to get ahead of the problem.
But cases like Mr. Sreekumar’s are not isolated incidents – last year, Manitoba’s health minister ordered a review into the death of a middle-aged man who spent eight hours waiting for care at the emergency room of that province’s largest hospital. An Ontario coroner has announced an inquest into the death of a 16-year-old who died after an eight-hour ER wait in the Toronto area.
Standing beside her dead husband last week – still intubated and draped in a pink blanket from the neck down – Ms. Sreekumar voiced her anger: “All of Grey Nuns hospital have basically killed my husband,” she said in a video shared widely on social media.
Ms. Sreekumar stayed with him a while that evening. “His body was cold. I tried pumping his heart, nothing. He never came back,” she said, her voice shaking in an interview on Monday.
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Acute Care Alberta, one of the four health agencies created as part of Premier Danielle Smith’s remaking of the province’s health care system, is leading a probe into the circumstances of Mr. Sreekumar’s death. Covenant Health, a publicly funded Catholic health care provider that operates Grey Nuns, will participate.
Covenant Health did not respond to questions about the circumstances of Mr. Sreekumar’s death.
Officials at Acute Care Alberta initially said last week that Covenant Health would lead the investigation. The province on Monday said that had changed but did not explain why.
The Alberta government said it doesn’t plan to conduct either a judicial or public inquiry.
Alberta’s Chief Medical Examiner, which investigates sudden or unexplained deaths, is also conducting a review.
Alberta government orders review after man dies in ER while waiting for care
In Ms. Smith’s reorganization of Alberta health care, private providers are set to play a much bigger role. The Premier has said ownership of some hospitals would be turned over to providers like Covenant Health – a not-for-profit which in 2025 received more than $900-million in public funding – to create competition within the health care system.
Dr. Brian Wirzba, president of the Alberta Medical Association, which represents physicians in the province, said on Sunday that it is “concerned about the pressures facing emergency care in Alberta and whether the system is adequately resourced to support patients safely, sustainably and with accountability.”
The Alberta NDP said hospitals need to be better staffed and called for a transparent review.
Recent data show emergency rooms across the country are struggling to process patients in a timely manner.
On Monday, the average emergency department waiting time at Grey Nuns was more than four hours; half of the Edmonton region’s hospitals posted waiting times longer than that, according to the Alberta Health Services dashboard. The longest, at Misericordia Community Hospital, was nearly 5½ hours.
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Ms. Sreekumar says when her husband was finally called, no beds were available, but hospital staff brought him into the treatment area, where he collapsed about a minute after walking through the door.Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
For years, waiting times in Canada for initial assessments in emergency departments have been climbing. In 2024-25, the average wait was 5½ hours for an initial assessment, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
The average Alberta resident waited 5.4 hours.
Paul Parks, an emergency physician and former president of the Alberta Medical Association, said emergency room deaths like Mr. Sreekumar’s are a symptom of “system-wide failure.”
At over-capacity hospitals, he said, triage systems – which would normally provide care within two hours to a patient experiencing chest pain – begin to break down. Nurses are frequently being assigned to re-assess patients in waiting rooms over and over again until space becomes available, Dr. Parks said.
“Almost every [emergency] department in Edmonton zone right now – they’re actually functioning as hospital wards that can just intermittently see some emerge patients.”
