Watch above: An Edmonton man is speaking out after he was given another patient’s documents while being discharged from a city hospital. Included in those papers was a prescription for medication containing codeine, which he’s allergic to. Shallima Maharaj reports.
EDMONTON – An Edmonton man was left stunned after being discharged from the Royal Alexandra Hospital and discovering the discharge papers he was given were not his own.
“I got this gentleman’s paperwork with his Alberta health care number, his birthday, his name. Everything. Everything of this gentleman’s is here,” said Kevin Plican.
Plican was also handed prescriptions and instructions for follow-up appointments.
The father of three was in hospital after experiencing severe abdominal pain. He has cirrhosis of the liver – the result of years of alcohol abuse.
Plican is currently waiting for a liver transplant.
“I don’t know if I’m more disappointed or if I’m more hurt,” he said.
Close friend, Kim Springsteel, was with Plican at the hospital.
“I don’t understand how these mistakes can happen,” she said.
“These mistakes are what’s going to kill somebody.”
Among the prescribed medication was Tylenol 3, which contains codeine, which Plican is allergic to.
He happened to notice the name on the discharge papers was not his before having the prescription filled and phoned the hospital to get to the bottom of the mix-up.
“The charge nurse – all she said to me was ‘Yeah, I’ll look through your chart. It should still be here. We’ll fax off the right prescriptions to Costco. Can you please shred these documents?’,” recalled Plican.
Alberta Health Services says this type of incident is rare.
It adds standard protocol is to ask the patient to return the documents that were accidentally distributed.
“I think anytime when you actually have people in the system, there’s always going to be room for human error,” said Dr. Verna Yiu, vice president of quality and AHS chief medical officer.
“I think in this setting, it was human error. The people involved were obviously very, very apologetic and not happy that this happened,” she added.
This comes after AHS apologized for a privacy breach at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary. 247 patients records were accessed inappropriately by a staff member.
“The big lesson to take away here is the hospital needs to do something about its record management system, about procedures and policies for discharging patients and for disclosure of information,” said Professor Ubaka Ogbogu with the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Law.
AHS says incidents like this are uncommon, and that new processes have since been implemented to prevent this from happening again.
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