EDMONTON – A former emergency ward manager at Calgary’s Peter Lougheed Hospital says a memo about possible queue-jumping in 2009 went to the bottom of her priority list.
    
Kathy Taylor has told an inquiry that there were already patients waiting hours for care and she couldn’t get nurses and doctors to put up with the stress of working on the ward.
    
Taylor says the ER was never pressured to move VIPs to the head of the line and wouldn’t have even if it had been asked.
    
She says resources were so tight, it was all doctors and nurses could do to make sure critical cases got immediate care.
    
Taylor says the overcrowding has diminished in the last two years.
    
Taylor was testifying at an inquiry into concerns that politicians and other prominent people were getting preferential access to care.