WINNIPEG – The Winnipeg mom who killed her two young children and herself last summer “slipped through the cracks,” Manitoba’s chief medical examiner says.
But Dr. A. Thambiraja Balachandra won’t call an inquest into the murder-suicide that’s been blamed on postpartum depression. Instead, he wants the province’s doctors to conduct their own examination of how the troubled woman was diagnosed and treated.
“We don’t know how she fell through the cracks or how we could better have served her that’s what the (College of Physicians and Surgeons) is going to find,” Balachandra told Global News Wednesday.
Balachandra also noted that the deaths of Lisa Gibson, 32, and her children Anna, 2, and Nicholas, 3 months, were not inevitable.
“The three deaths were preventable,” a news release from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said Wednesday morning.
Lisa Gibson drowned her two children and herself in Winnipeg in late July. The children were found in the family home’s bathtub on July 24. Their mother was found in the Red River three days later.
Lisa Gibson had been diagnosed with postpartum depression following the birth of Nicholas.
“Lisa was suffering from depression. We don’t know to what extent, but she went to the hospital, saw a doctor,” Balachandra said.
Balachandra has recommended that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba “investigate the diagnosis, treatment and management of Lisa Gibson and take adequate action to educate the medical community to prevent similar tragedies in the future.”
The head of Manitoba’s College of Physicians and Surgeons said Wednesday he hadn’t heard from the medical examiner.
Dr. Bill Pope cautioned that doctors shouldn’t be the only people involved in assessing what happened to Lisa Gibson, but that nurses, psychiatric nurses and others could offer insight.
“A judgment call is a judgment call and it’s made with not only good intentions but good information, and still sometimes patients don’t get the emergency treatment they might need,” Pope told Global News.
He said any changes would be a long time in coming.
“It might be that the standards committee might look at it and create some sort of a more specific standard in this issue. If that were to happen, it would go on our website. That will take a while, not a week or two.”
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