Tragic waits
West Prince woman says grieving families should not be put through added stress of waiting for coroner
Families suffering the unexpected loss of a loved one shouldn’t have their grief compounded by an extended wait for a coroner, says Patricia “Tishie” Shea.
The Pleasant View mother is now leading the charge to have legislation changed so bodies will no longer be left on the sides of roadways or elsewhere for extended periods following accidents.
Shea’s 14-year-old son, Conor, was fatally injured on Jan. 17, 2016, when his snowmobile collided
with a car near his home. The grieving mother and another son, Bradley, were among the first people on the scene, arriving ahead of emergency personnel.
Shea said she was told her son could not be moved until a coroner arrived to pronounce him deceased.
“I asked for Conor to be put in the ambulance many times, but they are not allowed to. They only transport the living. So that’s in their rule. “Wherever that rule comes from, we need to fix it,” she insists.
She’s encouraged that Tignish-Palmer Road MLA Hal Perry has agreed to raise her concerns in the legislature. Chief provincial coroner Desmond Colohan confirmed in an interview with the Journal Pioneer Thursday, changes have been proposed that would allow other medical professionals, such as registered nurses and advanced care paramedics, to be on-call as death investigators while they are off duty.
“If we identify potential candidates for these positions; if we convince government to fund the positions, Nova Scotia has said, ‘We will train your death investigators, the same way we train our own, and hand them back to you trained and ready to go,’” said Colohan.
“It wouldn’t be unreasonable to set a year from now as a target to actually have found the funding and have these people trained and onboard.”
He said the province currently has five family physicians taking calls as coroners, with just one in Summerside for Prince County. The five handle about 240 cases per year. There are times when there are only one or two of them available to take a call, and on rare occasions, none are available. He said P.E.I. has had to call upon assistance from Nova Scotia in some cases. Colohan said he is aware of three situations in the past three years – all originating from West Prince – where concerns were raised about extended wait times for a coroner. “It appears there was miscommunication in all three cases between aggrieved relatives and the professionals who were on the scene about what the process was supposed to be,” he said.
Colohan maintains it is reasonable for the deceased to remain at the scene for a certain period of time.
“There’d be some time taken for the police to complete their investigation before they would want to move the body and that’s part of the timeframe.”
In all three cases he investigated, an autopsy was ordered. In one case, he said there was a delay in getting a vehicle to the scene to transport the body.
Shea said it upset her that she was asked at the scene about which funeral home to call to pick up Conor, suggesting that’s not the place for that conversation. She feels her son should have been transported by ambulance to Western Hospital and have the family make those decisions there.
She said her family’s wait was shortened to two hours only because a fire department volunteer and the funeral home were able to make arrangements to transport Conor’s body to Charlottetown.
Shea recently reached out through social media and heard from 68 people who experienced long wait times, some much longer than hers.
“Two hours felt like a million years,” she said. “Something has to be done. It has to be done for the families; it has to be done for the firemen. This has to be fixed.”