A middle-aged man died in emergency room has that of Winnipeg Health Sciences Center (HSC) Tuesday morning, according to hospital officials.
HSC Chief Operating Officer Dr. Shawn Young did not reveal what medical emergency caused the man’s death, citing patient confidentiality laws, but said the man was a low-risk patient. acuity and that he had been waiting in the emergency room for a long time.
“Those waits can be quite long,” Young said. “When we look at the patients who wait the longest, those 90th percentiles, they can last up to 10 hours and longer, and this patient would have fit that.”
Young said the patient was brought in by ambulance shortly after midnight, triaged and given some evaluations. Around 8 a.m., his condition deteriorated and he was taken to the resuscitation room. He was pronounced dead shortly after.
The patient’s death will be investigated, which will include a review of the patient’s records, assessments, and any video footage or underlying health conditions.
Young said the emergency room has seen an average of 100 patients in the past 24 hours, including a number of very serious patients. He said the hospital was having trouble getting patients out of the hospital, leading to reinforcements.
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“We had a number of patients admitted to the ward, and we were unable to place them in beds in the facility because the HSC patients we needed to discharge – we were unable to bring them back to their communities or residences in a timely manner.
Michael Herman, an Ottawa doctor and member of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, said it’s often a problem that leads to long wait times in emergency rooms.
“The real factor is the inability of emergency patients to be flown through the department and transported to the hospital, or wherever they need to be,” Herman said.
Young said he did not believe staffing levels in the emergency room were a factor in the patient’s death, and that the hospital had initiated several surge protocols in the past 24 hours to improve flow patients. He added that wait times are slowly improving.
“They’re not where we want them to be — it’s going to be a long time before we get them to where we want them to be — but they’ve gotten better over the last year,” Young said.
In February 2023, a patient died while waiting in an HSC corridor after being triaged. One study found that there was an increase in the number of critically ill patients in the emergency department at the time of his death.
In November 2023, a patient died in Grace Hospital’s emergency room after waiting 33 hours for a bed.
On January 19, 2024, a patient died in the emergency room of Saint-Boniface Hospital. The patient died after waiting five hours and undergoing diagnostic tests.