The death of a patient waiting in a hallway at a Winnipeg hospital’s busy emergency room is being investigated as a critical incident, health officials say.
The patient arrived at the Health Sciences Centre by ambulance just after 11:30 p.m. Feb 27 where officials have said they were assessed and triaged.
But roughly an hour later, their condition worsened. Staff attended to the patient, officials have said, but they were declared dead shortly after.
Health Sciences Centre COO Dr. Shawn Young has said it was a night where seriously ill patients needing immediate care filled the emergency room.
Health officials announced an initial investigation into the patient’s death last week, and on Thursday confirmed the death is now considered a critical incident.
Provincial legislation defines critical incident reporting as “an unintended event that occurs when health services results in a consequence to a patient that is serious, undesired and not the result of an underlying health condition or from a risk inherent in providing health services.”
The designation means a full report into what happened will be made public within three months, as required by the legislation.
Officials have said they can’t discuss details including the patient’s identity, age and cause of death, citing personal health information privacy requirements.
In a statement Thursday, Shared Health said over-capacity protocols were raised at HSC’s ER in the afternoon of Feb. 28, following the patient’s death “as patient flow challenges continued to worsen.”
Young has said staffing levels were “at or near baseline” the night the patient died, but the ER was seeing a high number of high-acuity patients at the time.
On Thursday he said even with baseline staffing, the ER can become full because beds aren’t available in other parts of the hospital.
“The challenges we have with flow to get people through the emergency department and into beds is related to staffing elsewhere,” he said.
“So even though the staffing in the emergency department could be OK, where those patients are going, they’re going to really quite understaffed areas at times.
“That was the difference.”
Health officials haven’t said how many patients were in HSC’s emergency room at the time, or how many other patients were in a hallway when the patient died.
They have said the investigation will look into whether paramedics were still with the patient or whether they were being attended to by a health-care aide. Officials have said there were no family members with the patient.
Young said Thursday the final report will make recommendations about how to prevent similar situations in the future.
He said all the recommendations will be made public, as will any details about the incident that don’t compromise patient confidentially.
– with files from Global News’ Sam Thompson