HSR duo hailed for saving senior on the chilliest night
Family raises serious questions about how 85-year-old was able to walk out of Hamilton General
THE FAMILY of a vulnerable and confused 85-year-old woman who went missing from Hamilton General Hospital during extremely cold weather is crediting two HSR drivers with saving her life.
Temperatures plunged to a low of -22.8 C when Shirley Lipnicky — who family say had been repeatedly flagged as a flight risk to staff — walked out of the hospital on Barton Street East around 7 p.m. on Feb. 1.
“It could have been a tragedy,” said her daughter, Sue Lipnicky. “It was a happy ending but with no help from the hospital.”
The senior, who was disorientated, had been wearing street clothes on the ward instead of a hospital gown, despite her family’s protests that it would make it easier for her to leave Hamilton General. Her coat and boots had been in a locker, but her family says she got access to them when she was moved and they were left on a chair in her new room.
Her family believes his decision to let her on without her bus pass and the assistance Buston and another driver later provided made all the difference that night.
“I was devastated because I forecast something like this would happen,” Lipnicky said. “Every day, I made them aware she was a flight risk. I could not have made it any clearer and it just slips through the cracks.”
Familiar with riding the bus to her east-end home with her 88-year-old husband, Shirley appears to have got on soon after leaving the hospital.
“I was heading eastbound on Barton Street and she was running across the street and got on my bus,” said Robb Buston, who started driving for HSR in April.
“She looked kind of flustered. She walked by and didn’t pay a fare, but it was very cold that night so I’m not going to make a deal of it ... Any kind of vulnerable population, we’d all do the same. That’s just the right thing to do.”
Her family believes his decision to let her on without her bus pass and the assistance Buston and another driver later provided made all the difference that night.
“I’m just thankful the bus driver let her on,” Lipnicky said. “She had no money, nothing. Had he questioned it and not let her on, there probably would have been a not so happy ending.”
While Buston kept an eye on Shirley, the family says they were kept in the dark for nearly an hour while Hamilton General Hospital looked for her.
Lipnicky said staff didn’t tell her that her mother was missing when she phoned to check on her condition around 7:15 p.m. Instead, she says they told her they were too busy and to try again later.
She says she wasn’t informed until around 7:52 p.m. when she got a call telling her that the last time her mother was seen was at 7 p.m.
“Why did they wait?” Lipnicky asked. “I’m 10 to 15 minutes away from the hospital. I would have been there.”
Shirley’s adult granddaughter rushed to Hamilton General to help in the search. All the family was thinking about was the story of former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s 93-year-old mother.
Hélène Rowley Hotte was found dead in the snow Jan. 20 after she got locked out of her Montreal seniors residence.
“This could have been terrible,” said Shirley’s daughter, Heather Hamilton, who lives in Collingwood. “It’s a good-news story but she certainly ... could have frozen to death on some side street.”
The family says there was a brief moment of hope just after 8 p.m. when hospital staff thought they’d found her, but they say it turned out to be a different missing patient.
“My niece is now looking from floor to floor with the security,” Hamilton said. “They found somebody ... My niece goes up and says, ‘That’s not my grandma.’ They say, ‘Oh, this is somebody else we’re missing.’”
MEANWHILE,
the bus was at the end of the line and the driver was asking Shirley where she was headed.
“You want to make sure they get home safe,” Buston said. “Otherwise, they might be wandering around and on a night like that, it might not be good.”
Unfamiliar with the location she gave, he went to a fellow driver, Virginia Morrow, for assistance. The two used a smartphone to figure out where she needed to go and Buston helped Shirley, who is about fourfoot-nine, off his bus and got her settled on Morrow’s.
But Morrow became increasingly concerned especially when Shirley didn’t seem to recognize where she was as they approached the stop.
“She was standing at the wheel well; she just looked dazed and confused,” said Morrow, who has been driving for HSR for two and a half years. “We kept driving down the line and I kept watching her to see if she was OK.”
By this time, Shirley had been missing for roughly one hour and 15 minutes and her family was just discovering police had never been called. Not willing to wait any longer, Lipnicky called 911 herself. She has high praise for the quick response of the operator and police.
“I asked them to check the Barton bus route as this bus stops at the corner of my parents’ street,” Lipnicky said. “I thought she may be trying to get home.”
Little did Lipnicky know that the bus driver was already raising alarm about Shirley.
“Sometimes you get that feeling that something is not right,” Morrow said. “With it being so cold, I just thought it’s better to be safe and call this in than to drop this lady off somewhere that she shouldn’t be. She seemed like she was lost.”
City spokesperson Amanda Kinnaird says bus drivers receive training on spotting vulnerable passengers in need of help.
“As part of their training and human decency, they do this often,” she said. “This is a really good thing that doesn’t get talked about ... We’re very proud of them.”
When she called into the HSR, Morrow was asked to describe the woman on the bus and what she was wearing.
“He said he’d just got off the phone with police and she was a missing person, to hang tight, keep driving around and they’ll get back to me,” Morrow said.
She was asked to meet police in front of Mohawk College’s campus on Barton Street.
“The young officer came and talked to her and asked if she had been at the General Hospital,” Morrow said. “He asked her to go with him and that was the end.”
For the first two days she was back at the hospital, Shirley had one staff member who stayed with her all the time. Her family says she also now wears a bracelet that sounds an alarm if she leaves the ward.
“That should have been on her from day one,” Hamilton said. “I was so frustrated thinking how dare this happen. It was preventable it my eyes. It shouldn’t have occurred.”
Hamilton Health Sciences, which operates the hospital, said in a statement Friday that it has protocols and procedures to care for adult patients with wandering behaviours.
“These protocols ensure patient safety while also allowing for independent mobility for a person with cognitive impairment or altered mental status.”
The family says the protocols did not keep their mother safe. They say she had been found wandering the ward naked at least once before she went missing.
“It’s been a whole range of mistakes I feel were made,” Hamilton said. “We told everyone she was a runner. Could she not have been watched more carefully? When she did leave, could they not have said, ‘This is serious’?”
They also question protocols regarding missing patients which they feel endangered their mother instead of helping her, particularly waiting to call the police and the family.
“They need to change the process here,” Lipnicky said. “Frigid temperatures like this and you’re dealing with folks in dementia; they could have escalated quicker.”
The family is concerned the hospital still hasn’t got the message as they say she went four hours with no bracelet after it was removed for a diagnostic test and not put back on until the family realized it was missing.
“She could have went missing again,” Lipnicky said.
In addition, they say nothing has been done to stop a male patient from repeatedly wandering into her room, scaring her and making her more eager to leave.
“You’ve got to speak up if you want to see changes,” said Lipnicky about their choice to share their story.
The family also wants to make sure credit is given where it’s due.
“Thank goodness for the bus driver (s),” Hamilton said. “Had she gotten off that bus anywhere, she could have stepped off and not had a clue where she was in that cold, cold weather.”
“I’m just thankful the bus driver let her on. She had no money, nothing. Had he questioned it and not let her on, there probably would have been a not so happy ending.” SUE LIPNICKY Shirley Lipnicky’s daughter