The frightening story of Janice Thomas, who was ignored last month in a St. Boniface Hospital emergency room hallway for 20 minutes while gasping for air, is surely a sign that Manitoba’s health-care system is still broken.
Thomas, 62, had an allergic reaction to shellfish on April 17 that cross-contaminated the vermicelli chicken she ordered from a restaurant. She had difficulty breathing and called 911 from home.
Paramedics arrived quickly, administered epinephrine and rushed Thomas to St. Boniface Hospital, where she was triaged as a Level 2, the second-highest urgency level used by Canadian ERs.
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS
Janice Thomas was placed in a hallway at St. Boniface Hospital last month, unable to breathe, and received no medical attention from a doctor or nurse for 20 minutes.
Despite that, she was placed in a hallway, unable to breathe, and received no medical attention from a doctor or nurse for 20 minutes. The only care she got during that time was from a paramedic who gave her oxygen.
“I sat on that stretcher, unable to breathe, for over 20 minutes,” Thomas told the Free Press. “With an anaphylactic reaction, I am considered life or death. I can’t wait for a room. During this time, not one staff member from the St. Boniface Hospital came to check on me.”
Thomas was eventually wheeled into a treatment room where she received care, but even then she was ignored after being stabilized.
The hospital later apologized to Thomas and told her she was “failed.”
Caution should be used when drawing conclusions from a single incident. But the reasons given for the unacceptable care Thomas received — that the ER was overwhelmed with patients — is further evidence that Winnipeg hospitals continue to be understaffed and cannot meet patient demand.
There are simply not enough doctors, nurses and allied health-care workers to treat the volume of patients showing up at hospital in a timely fashion — including a patient with a serious ailment, such as Thomas.
It may be understandable for Level 4 or Level 5 patients (assessed as the least urgent; earaches or sprained ankles, for example) to wait several hours for care in an ER. Patients such as Thomas will always take precedence over the latter, as they should. But it’s entirely unacceptable for a Level 2 patient with life-threatening symptoms to not get immediate care.
People need to know that when they show up at an ER with a serious medical condition that requires immediate attention that they will get it. That is the main function of an ER. If it can no longer perform that task on a consistent basis, the system is more broken than we thought.
We don’t know how common Thomas’s story is, or all the factors that led to such poor care. That’s why this case should be reviewed and the results made public. This is a taxpayer-funded hospital. The public has a right to know what went wrong in this case and what steps have been taken, if any, to avoid a similar occurrence in the future.
Manitobans don’t get much useful information about hospital operations. The only regular statistics health officials release about ERs are the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s monthly wait-time reports posted online. (Far more data is collected, including length of stay in ERs, but is not regularly released).
The WRHA report provides median and 90th-percentile wait-time data for ERs and urgent-care centres at Winnipeg hospitals. It gives the public some insight, but it’s limited. If wait times are becoming consistently longer, it usually means hospitals are overcrowded and understaffed. When that happens, even high-acuity patients such as Thomas may not get the immediate care they need.
ER wait times at Winnipeg hospitals continue to grow. According to the WRHA’s latest data for March, the median wait time is 3.73 hours (the point at which half of patients wait longer and half wait less) across Winnipeg hospitals. That’s a 38 per cent increase over the 2.7-hour median wait time for March 2023. After showing modest improvement over the winter, ER wait times climbed again in March (the median wait time in February was 3.58 hours).
The longest wait for nine out of 10 patients (the 90th-percentile wait) was 9.93 hours in March, unchanged from February but far higher than the 7.57 hours in March 2023.
The 90th-percentile wait time at St. Boniface Hospital’s ER was 11.48 hours in March, the second-highest behind Health Sciences Centre (12.05). It’s down from February but much higher than it was in March 2023 at 8.4 hours.
The statistics show the health-care system is getting worse. Janice Thomas’s story shows how that’s playing out in real life. It’s not pretty.
tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca
Tom Brodbeck
Columnist
Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.