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The Alberta Health Services (AHS) is investigating how some patient’s referrals to community healthcare providers were inadequately processed, leading to delayed care.
In a statement on Friday, the provincial health-care provider said an internal audit completed in late September revealed that some patient referrals to external healthcare providers in Central Zone were not properly processed.
“In some cases, this caused a delay in care”, reads the statement. “Further investigating determined that the issue was not limited to Central Zone, and that some patients in all five AHS Zones (Central, North, Edmonton, Calgary, South) may have been impacted.
AHS says its clinical team is currently working on assessing every delayed, to determine its impact on each patient and to schedule those patients immediately. “AHS will contact every patient where potential for adverse clinical impact has occurred. Patients will be provided with the opportunity to address any questions and concerns they might have.”
The provincial health-care provider says although the review involves a large number of referrals, the potentially affected patients are a small number of the total referrals being assessed.
On average, AHS issues approximately 100,000 referrals annually.
AHS has also executed some measures to prevent the issue in the future, including increasing training for processing patient referrals, improved auditing to mitigate future challenges, and improving electronic delivery of outgoing referrals.
AHS says it will work closely with the Health Quality Council of Alberta, as part of their independent, third-party review into this issue.
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