Hospital stories create new breed of activist

OVERCROWDED HOSPITALS, FAILING EQUIPMENT, HIGHLIGHT SYSTEM SHORTAGES

Jamie-Lee Ball doesn’t plan to quietly let her nightmarish five days in the hallways of the Brampton Civic Hospital fade from public attention. The 25-year-old is taking her place at the vanguard of a new movement among patients, hoping to draw attention to hospital overcrowding across Canada.

Like others who’ve gone public to describe indignities suffered in crowded hospitals this year, Ball is becoming an activist — starting petitions, complaining to Ontario’s patient ombudsman, and pressuring politicians for improvements.

“It’s overwhelming the response I’ve received,” she said in a telephone interview. “A lot of people are realizing they can share their stories, and their hard-earned tax dollars spent on the health system mean they should have the basic necessities.”

Ball’s mother, Lori Leckie, says: “We want to be the face of this issue.”

Ball was among several recent cases to emerge offering frightening accounts of Canadian hospitals struggling to cope with the flow of patients, long waits in emergency, and makeshift hallway medicine.

She arrived at Brampton’s ER with intense abdominal pain on March 25. She says she was only admitted after collapsing and screaming in pain on the waiting room floor, and ended up spending five days in corridors on a gurney, unable to eat or drink for days as she awaited tests to diagnose the cause of her internal bleeding.

She likened her sleepless nights to a war scene, as she lay alongside other groaning patients lined up in a corridor behind cloth screens.

“People say they can relate to the experience and ... they’re grateful somebody has finally spoken up,” she said.

Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa told The Canadian Press his provincial budget Thursday will contain funding to deal with overcrowded hospitals, saying: “We don’t want people to be in hallways.”

In Halifax, Kim D’Arcy told her story on Tuesday of how her dying husband Jack Webb spent over six hours on a gurney in the ER hallway of the Halifax Infirmary on Jan. 28. The 68-year-old was also bumped from a private room by another patient and overheard staff saying “If he stops breathing, don’t resuscitate” in a recovery room during the final five days of his life.

The problems occurred as the emergency department called special “code census” alerts on 23 out of 30 days in that month, indicating the hospital’s ER was unsafe due to overcrowding.

Webb’s case has provoked opposition calls for a public investigation, with Nova Scotia’s governing Liberals committing to an internal review.

Meanwhile, in Abbotsford, B.C., friends and family have complained of a hasty ER assessment after the death of 56-year-old Mary Louis Murphy.

Murphy visited the hospital on Jan. 30 complaining of chest pains and died later that night after receiving some morphine and being sent home, says 25-year-old Andrew Grimeau, who Murphy was in the process of adopting prior to her death.

In Ottawa, Dana Whitman said she went to the Queensway Carleton hospital in late February and spent four-and-a-half hours in a waiting room despite having a “fever card” given to chemotherapy patients who should be treated quickly when their immune system is depleted.

Like Ball, the 55-year-old has been in touch with the hospital ombudsman and is looking for change.

“We’re paying for this through our taxes and it’s not working very well,” said the law clerk.

Emergency room overcrowding, referred to in the Romanow royal commission 14 years ago as the “canary in the coal mine” for Canadian health care, has been a see-saw battle for decades. It is viewed by researchers as a sign of an inability to move patients into the main hospital wards.