Last summer, Alberta Health Services published their 2024–2025 annual report.
Given recent discussion about hospital capacity in the province, I was curious to see how the number of hospital beds has changed in Alberta over time.
Alberta Health Services maintains an archive of annual reports going back to their 2009–2010 fiscal year, so I decided to come through them to find out the number of acute care beds there were in each year.
Here is what I found.
Over the last 16 years, the number of acute care beds has increased from 7,719 to 8,764. That is an increase of over 1,000 beds. On average, Alberta gained 65 new acute care beds per year during that period.
During the period leading up to the 2015 provincial election, while the Progressive Conservatives were the governing party, Alberta saw a net increase of 752 acute care beds, or an average of 125 per year.
Over the 4 years that the NDP were in charge, acute care beds increased by just 12, when accounting for annual gains and losses. That works out to an annual average of 3 new beds per year.
In the 6 years since the UCP took power, acute care beds in Alberta have increased by another 281, or an average of 47 per year.
Now, having more than 1,000 additional acute care beds in Alberta is definitely a good thing. After all, more people live in Alberta now than there were in 2009, so of course we should have more acute care beds. And that is assuming we had an adequate number of beds back in 2009 to start with.
Speaking of population increases, that brings up a question: has the rise in the number of acute care beds in the last decade and a half kept up with the rise in population? Did one increase faster than the other.
Well, the number of acute care beds at the end of the first quarter of 2009 was 7,719, as previously mentioned, which increased to 8,764 by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
That is an increase of 1,045, or 13.54%.
In comparison, Alberta’s population grew from 3,659,235 at the start of the second quarter of 2009 to 5,010,078 at the start of the second quarter of 2025.
It rose by over 1.35 million people, or nearly 37%, during the same period.
Alberta’s population grew more than 2.5 times as quickly as the number of acute care beds in the province.
Under the PCs, Alberta’s population grew by 12.75% in this 16-year reporting period. It grew by 5.78% during the NDP administration and 15.5% while the UCP have been in charge.
At the end of March 2009, there was 1 acute care bed for every 474.06 people in the province. By the time the PCs were voted out of office, that had increased 2.74% to 1 bed for every 487.07 Albertans.
While the NDP were in power, it increased by another 4.98% to 1 bed per 511.32 people.
Over the last 6 years, under the UCP, it has risen another 11.8%, with 1 bed for every 571.67 persons.
Just to be clear, the number of people per bed has increased by almost 100 over the last 16 years. There are now 97.61 more people potentially sharing each acute care bed in Alberta, despite Alberta having over 1,000 more acute care beds.
Another way to look at the data is the number of beds per 1,000 people.
Alberta has gone from 2.11 beds per 1,000 people in March 2009 to just 1.75 beds per 1,000 people last March.
If Alberta wanted to return to the 2.109 beds per 1,000 people (or 474.06 persons per bed) that it saw in March 2009, it would need to increase their total number of acute care beds to 10,568.55.
They need to add over 1,800 more acute care beds, and that is not including population increases between April 2025 and April 2026. The largest year-over-year increase during this reporting period was 309 beds back in the 2010–2011 fiscal year.
We need almost 6 times that many.
But will the UCP government be willing to prioritize an investment of this sort?
