A patient died in the waiting room at Health Sciences Centre’s adult emergency department Tuesday morning.
A Shared Health spokesperson confirmed the death before a news conference was held later in the afternoon.
In a statement handed out at the news conference, HSC’s chief operating officer said the middle-aged man was a low-acuity patient. He arrived at the emergency department by ambulance shortly after midnight.
“The patient was assessed, triaged and directed to wait in the waiting room and to let staff know if their conditions change or worsen,” Dr. Shawn Young said in the statement.
“This patient was reassessed while in the waiting room. Just before 8 a.m., staff noted the patient’s condition had significantly worsened. Medical interventions subsequently occurred, and the patient was transported to a resuscitation room.”
He was declared dead a short time later.
The male’s death and all potentially contributing factors will be investigated, Young said in the statement.
He said staff members are working under “challenging circumstances as our site deals with some significant patient flow challenges,” including the use of overcapacity protocols.
“These protocols are essentially an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to improving patient flow. Our teams work together to relocate patients nearing discharge to alternate areas in order to free up a bed” for people waiting in the emergency department,” Young said in the statement.
“We will work to identify areas where we could have done something differently but also to identify lessons, practices or protocols that we can implement to ensure this does not happen again.”
Young said at the news conference that there were about 100 people in the ER at the time. Staffing levels were in the normal range at that time and were not a factor in the death, he said.
A patient died in St. Boniface Hospital’s emergency department in January 2024. The person had been waiting about five hours and had been triaged and received various diagnostic tests, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said at the time.
The death of a patient in Grace Hospital’s emergency department In November 2023 was later ruled a critical incident. The patient had been in the ER for 33 hours and was triaged, assessed and receiving care while awaiting transfer to an in-patient bed, the WRHA said at the time.
In September 2008, Brian Sinclair was found dead in HSC’s ER waiting room. Sinclair, a 45-year-old Indigenous man and double-amputee who used a wheelchair, was in the waiting room for 34 hours without being questioned or treated by staff. Sinclair, who was seeking treatment for a blocked urinary catheter, might have been dead for as long as seven hours by the time a family member of a patient noticed him and alerted medical staff members.
In a nearly 200-page report released in December 2014, provincial court Judge Tim Preston wrote that while Sinclair “was a man with a number of serious health challenges… the acute peritonitis which caused his death was avoidable.”
fpcity@freepress.mb.ca