Manitoba officials say there will be two reviews into an incident at Winnipeg’s Grace Hospital, which led to the death of a woman who waited hours for care in the emergency department.
According to a social media post from her daughter, Genevieve Price died after waiting more than 30 hours to see a doctor. The post said Price originally sought medical care for a swollen wrist and hand, later suffering multiple organ failure when she wasn’t treated.
The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) confirmed it started a critical incident review into Price’s death, which is standard in cases like this.
In a statement, the WRHA’s Kerstin Jordan said the health authority can’t share specifics due to privacy laws, but the circumstances of Price’s case are being looked at.
“Hospital leadership and our patient relations team will remain in touch with the family, and they will be invited to participate in the review and creation of improvement recommendations,” Jordan said.
“Part of delivering good care for patients is addressing larger system concerns like patient flow and helping patients move from the emergency department to other parts of the health system as quickly as possible.”
Jordan said the recent tragedy shows how critical it is that systemic issues affecting wait times are addressed.
“As a nurse myself, I understand the distress and strain incidents like this have on the families of patients, but also the care teams involved. Our focus now will be on identifying improvements that help ensure events like this do not happen again.”
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Health minister Uzoma Asagwara said the government will launch a broader, more systemic review of policies to look for potential structural changes that may be needed.
“This situation is a tragedy. The family did everything they could do to get their mother the care that she needed when she needed it,” Asagwara said Wednesday.
“It is so important that we not only that we review and assess what happened here, but as a system we commit to taking the necessary steps to address the concerns that this family has brought forward and what we’re seeing affect real people.”
While Price died while waiting in a hospital emergency department, a new study from a national thinktank says tens of thousands of Canadians have died in the last fiscal year while on waitlists for medical treatment.
Colin Craig of SecondStreet.org told 680 CJOB’s Connecting Winnipeg on Wednesday that, according to data the organization obtained through freedom of information requests, just shy of 24,000 patients across Canada — waiting for treatment including heart surgery, hip operations and MRI scans — died between April 2024 and March of this year.
That number does not include statistics from Alberta and some parts of Manitoba.
Craig said the data shows a three per cent year-over-year increase in waiting list deaths, and that other developed nations with universal health care don’t face these issues.
“We have traveled to Sweden, France, Japan… they do not have the type of patient suffering like you see in this country,” he said.
“They’re puzzled by it. Why does a developed country like Canada have such long waits in the health care system and people dying on waiting lists?”
With files from The Canadian Press.
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