Good morning, everyone.

The call appears to be coming from inside the house. Or in this case, inside the hospital.

Physicians working at Edmonton’s largest hospitals are sounding alarm bells and want the Alberta government to declare a state of emergency with wards overflowing and no more room to safely accept patients.

“We’re operating in disaster mode everyday,” said Paul Parks, president-elect of the emergency physicians section of the Alberta Medical Association, this week. “We’re at this point where the only way that we can safely take care of new patients coming in is we have to activate an emergency plan.”

Parks said emergency and internal medicine physicians in the provincial capital have exhausted all their options and patients are at serious risk of harm.

The call to action by doctors comes just weeks after Prashant Sreekumar, a 44-year-old father of three, died from suspected cardiac arrest after spending eight hours in the emergency room at Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Community Hospital.

According to Sreekumar’s wife, he had been assessed and showed heightened blood pressure, but staff concluded that he didn’t need immediate care. When he was eventually taken into the treatment area, he collapsed.

“I thought he was fainting, but actually he was dying,” Niharika Sreekumar told The Globe and Mail in an interview.

On Wednesday, The Globe learned that Sreekumar was actually one of three people who died in the Grey Nuns ER on Dec. 22 “while receiving active care.”

Covenant Health, a publicly funded Catholic health care provider that operates Grey Nuns, did not provide any further details and said it was not permitted to comment on the types of care the patients received.

The Alberta government is now investigating the circumstances around Sreekumar’s death, although it is unclear if the review will extend to the other two deaths.

Influenza has hit all of Canada hard this winter, with infectious disease and public health experts warning that this season could be the worst in recent years.

And that has certainly contributed to overflowing hospitals in Edmonton and elsewhere in Alberta.

In terms of what an emergency declaration would look like, Parks said beds could be opened in other wards, patients from north of Edmonton could be transferred to Calgary, additional staff and beds could be added, and as a last resort, surgeries could be postponed.

“In order for us to take that next really sick person with influenza or pneumonia or stroke, we have to use surgical beds,” he said.

Maddison McKee, press secretary to Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange, said measures to ease strain on hospitals and staff, such as cancelling some scheduled surgeries, are in line with past years and have been required on a limited scale.

“Calls for a ‘state of emergency’ are misguided and would add nothing to what is already being done,” McKee said.

Raj Sherman, a former provincial politician and an emergency physician in Stony Plain, west of Edmonton, said some patients who live minutes away from Edmonton hospitals are being diverted to his facility, WestView Health Centre.

“I have never seen it this bad in 35 years of front-line medical practice in the emergency department,” said Sherman.

This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.