Staff warned incident like Monday’s Winnipeg ER death would happen: nurses’ union

The death of a patient in the Health Sciences Centre emergency department Monday is under investigation.

Health Sciences Centre Chief Operating Officer Dr. Shawn Young says the patient arrived just after 11:30 p.m. by ambulance and was assessed and triaged. Around an hour later, the patient’s condition worsened. Staff attended to them, but they were declared dead shortly after.

They will be looking into whether paramedics were still with them or whether they were being attended to by a health-care aide. There were no family members with the patient.

Young says it was a night where the seriously ill patients needing immediate care filled the emergency room.

“Our staffing was at or near baseline that evening.” Young said. “The number of high acuity patients however was quite high. We saw double the number of CTAS 1 patients, which are the highest acuity patients, that evening.”

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He also said the median wait time that night was around two hours.

Young acknowledges Winnipeggers may be shaken by this incident, but he is assuring them to keep seeking care at the hospital.

And he also admits wait times can be long.

“The system is here for you,” said Young. “However, having said that, we are still struggling with staffing throughout the site, which is really impairing our ability to get admitted patients into the facility. So being able to address the staffing challenges in particular is one of the biggest areas of work we need to really put all our efforts into.”

In a statement, Shared Health confirmed that a “critical incident” at the downtown Winnipeg hospital on Monday was the death of a patient, and that an initial review of the circumstances is underway.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson told 680 CJOB she was told about the incident by a staff member at HSC, but didn’t have any further details about who the patient was or how they died.

Jackson said there have been concerns among swamped hospital staff that this kind of situation could occur.

“I just know that the patient was in the ER and passed away in the ER in the waiting area,” she said.

“I do send condolences to the family. It’s very sad.

“I’ve been talking about how sad I feel for the nurses in that department, because they’ve been voicing concerns to their employer many, many times and for a very long time, that they have concerns this was going to happen.”

Shared Health said privacy legislation prevents it from providing specific details of a patient’s case.

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