Methods

Data are drawn from two public Alberta Health Services (AHS) sources: archived snapshots of active temporary service disruptions and the AHS notice/news archive.

The snapshot archive provides recurring records of disruptions active on specific dates. The notice archive is used to identify additional disruptions that may be missed or underrepresented in the snapshot stream.

A raw record is a source-specific posted assertion. Repeated assertions are reconciled while distinct service components and amendments retain their provenance.

A disruption interval is a source-supported period of posted unavailability or restriction. Unioned hours measure elapsed time after overlap is removed within each facility, service group, and reporting period. Totals across groups are service-hours.

A documented correction interval has a recorded source, eligibility decision, and timing rationale. It is subject to the same overlap merging and contributes only time not already supported.

The ED layer includes full ED closure or unavailable onsite physician coverage. Partial ED treatment-space loss alone is excluded. Non-ED layers include posted service, physician, operative-capability, admissions, and partial-capacity restrictions during the reporting window.

Non-ED hours are elapsed facility/service-group time under restriction, not lost bed-hours or complete hospital-closure time. General shortage wording, conditional risk without a supported restriction, unrelated service loss, and events outside the reporting window do not establish counted hours.

Unresolved scope, years, timing, or facility identity remain flagged; they are not assigned invented hours.

Intervals are reconstructed from the relevant source component. Printed dates and clocks retain their roles; forecast end dates are distinguished from reported restoration. A date-only boundary uses local 00:00 as an analytical convention, not a verified clinical clock. Intervals include their start and exclude their end.

Recurring restrictions are expanded only when their own wording and bounded affirmative source support establish the pattern. Ordinary opening hours alone do not establish disruption hours. Date-only weekday patterns use calendar-day bounds; an explicit first-onset clock does not shift every later recurrence.

Repeated snapshot assertions and notice records are reconciled by facility, service component, wording, and calendar support. Later records replace earlier support only when they document an amendment of the same component. Different component durations can coexist.

Overlapping intervals are unioned within each facility and service group before calculating reporting-period totals.

Source-linked corrections are retained with the source, interpretation, and affected component or calendar. The corrected reconstruction is checked for overlap and arithmetic consistency. Software checks do not establish independent human validation.

The dataset can be refreshed when new AHS archive snapshots or notices become available. Cached reruns support parser or manual-adjudication updates without re-scraping. Full fresh scrapes are required when newly posted public records must be incorporated.

Each release displays its publication date and coverage period in the tool. The release history on the SORCTracks page records the software version and release notes.

Timing structure and time-of-week partitions reconcile to the selected facility, service, and reporting-period total. The same logic applies to supported subtype views.

Timing structure is classified from the complete support for each source component before reporting-window clipping and cross-source union. Explicit recurring restrictions have recurring timing; uninterrupted support of at least seven local calendar days is sustained; other supported periods have no recurring timing identified. Incomplete or conflicting classifications remain unclassified. Overlap is counted once without treating one source as clinically authoritative.

Time of week uses Alberta local dates and clocks: weekday daytime 07:00–17:00, weekday evening 17:00–22:00, weekend or statutory holiday 07:00–22:00, and every night 22:00–07:00. Holidays use Alberta Employment Standards general holidays; optional holidays and public-service substitute days are excluded. Canada Day uses July 2 when July 1 falls on Sunday.

Disruption hours use integer elapsed seconds in UTC, retaining the actual duration across daylight-saving transitions. Calendar comparison denominators use the stated local civil-clock windows.

When all analyzed services are selected, hours are summed across service groups. Overlap between different groups at the same facility is retained, so the result is service-hours.

SORCTracks is a public-record reconstruction rather than an operational gold standard. Public wording is inconsistent across notices, site names are not always standardized, and some real disruptions cannot be timed defensibly from available source material.

Open-ended restrictions are bounded by accepted affirmative source support rather than carried forward indefinitely from a missing end date. A dated continuing assertion can support an interval interior without establishing eventual restoration; later unsupported time remains unknown. Comparisons across releases should account for their coverage periods and versioned interpretation rules.

Some disruptions may not have been posted, retained, or reconstructed. Some supported programme, regional, or unresolved facility records cannot be assigned to the map. The tool presents a known, reconstructable subset; provincial completeness and the direction of difference from actual clinical downtime are not established.

Disruption reasons are categorized from the verbatim text of source postings and reflect the stated reason as posted. They may not capture the underlying or proximate cause in all cases.

The public tool includes documentation and selected automation code for inspecting analytic logic and checking selected outputs against public source material. The full historical runtime and retained source evidence are not distributed with the public tool; independent reproduction would require reimplementation or scoped access to additional pipeline artifacts. Researchers seeking to validate specific records or coordinate on independent re-implementation are invited to contact info@sorc.ca.