Dislocated hip means 11-hour wait for a hospital
It was the kind of pain he’ll never forget.
But worse than the pain was the wait for an ambulance.
Trevor Garland, a retired McGill University manager, was up all in night with his wife after dislocating his right hip on Oct. 17 — the complication of hip-replacement surgery two weeks earlier.
The pain was sharp, throbbing and relentless. He phoned 911 just past 7:30 a.m., desperate for an ambulance to rush him to St. Mary’s Hospital to undergo emergency surgery to fix his artificial hip.
That’s when his ordeal began. Garland, who is 66, waited nine hours in his Roxboro home before an Urgences Santé ambulance pulled into his driveway, despite having called the dispatcher eight times. Even then, he had to wait another 40 minutes for a second ambulance to show up so paramedics could carry his body vertically on a special stretcher down the hall.
During the transport from the West Island to the Côte-desNeiges hospital, the ambulance
drove through traffic with its siren turned off because the paramedics did not consider his situation to be an emergency, Garland said. At 6:30 p.m., 11 hours after he first alerted 911, Garland finally arrived at St. Mary’s.
“It’s outrageous, it makes no sense,” Garland said on Friday, recovering in a hospital bed from the emergency surgery.
“When I called the ambulance dispatcher at noon, I was crying into the phone. I was begging them to take me to the hospital.”
Urgences Santé does not dispute Garland’s account. A spokesperson explained that on Oct. 17, Garland was “bumped” eight times by other emergencies that were deemed more urgent than his, underscoring the lack of resources at the ambulance service.
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“First, I want to say that we’re very sorry,” said Urgences Santé official Stéphane Smith, a paramedic himself since 2001.
“We find this situation to be deplorable. What you have to understand is that we tried eight times to send an ambulance to the gentleman’s address because we knew very well that he was in pain, but each time there were calls of a higher priority that had to be met.”
Those other emergencies included an individual who had been injured in a car crash, along with people who had just suffered heart attacks or who were in respiratory distress.
Urgences Santé covers all of Montreal and Laval. Its fleet of 110 ambulances responds to an average of 1,000 calls every 24 hours. But on some days, there are far more calls than the average, and that’s what happened last Wednesday.
“It’s sad,” Smith acknowledged. “It’s not something that we want to happen. We want to arrive at the scene of a call as quickly as possible. We want to serve the population. It’s our mission. We want to help people. We don’t want people to wait, especially someone who is older. But when we have to respond to someone else who has a heart attack or is in respiratory difficulty, we are obliged to go by priority.
“It’s not an isolated case,” Smith added. “I would be lying to you if I said that this doesn’t happen. Yes, it does happen. That’s why we try to find alternatives.”
One of Urgences Santé’s alternatives is asking a nurse from the 811 phone service to contact a person who has just called for an ambulance to make sure that there hasn’t been an error or to persuade someone whose case isn’t urgent to reach a hospital ER by other means.
In Garland’s case, a nurse did call and determined that he really needed an ambulance.
Given that Quebec’s population is aging and that there are spikes in the number of calls for an ambulance on some days, does it make sense to put more ambulances on the road?
“We’re at the maximum of resources that we can place on the road,” Smith said.
“But we have to work within a budgetary framework. We have to respect the budget. We function at the maximum of our personnel. Would I like tomorrow to invest more money to give even better service to the population? Of course, but we have to go with the number of personnel we have.”
Garland doesn’t buy Urgences Santé’s explanation. He noted that an ambulance arrived at his address 10 minutes after his doctor phoned Urgences Santé to stress the urgency of his case.
“I can’t believe that on the entire West Island I was the only one who was in this situation. The numbers don’t make any sense.”
Garland paused to reflect, his voice a little slurred from his pain medication.
“It’s really scary,” he said. “I really can’t understand how one person can be constantly bumped by other emergencies.”