The awful death of Jack Webb: Wife tells how crowded hospital failed her husband
MICHAEL TUTTON
HALIFAX — A Halifax woman says overcrowding at the city’s largest hospital left her husband suffering a series of indignities and delayed care during his last days of life.
Kim D’Arcy says her 68-yearold husband, Jack Webb, languished for six hours in a chilly emergency-room hallway at the Halifax Infirmary, had a broken IV in his arm, and was bumped from his room by another dying patient.
She says that shortly before Webb’s Feb. 1 death, they even heard a staffer yell not to resuscitate him if he stopped breathing.
Dr. Alan Drummond, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, says his death is an example of “the distinct level of human suffering associated with crowded emergency departments and crowded hospitals” plaguing Canadian medicare.
Canadian emergency rooms are increasingly issuing special “codes” indicating they’re too full — a process that sets off a domino effect where gravely ill people like Webb are pushed into regular hospital units already operating beyond capacity.
After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread into his adrenal glands and liver, Webb was admitted Jan. 27 to the Infirmary’s downtown emergency department.
Webb, former owner of a Mad Man McKay home electronics franchise, also had multiple sclerosis.
As the clock ticked past midnight, Webb lay on a gurney shivering in an ER hallway, as other patients rapidly filled a lineup around him.
“We felt like screaming. We felt very sad, very frustrated, helpless,” recalled D’Arcy. “When an ER doctor saw Jack at about 7 a.m., he told us that Jack was the sickest man to arrive into emergency that night.”
D’Arcy found herself growing confused, exhausted and disoriented by the chaotic atmosphere.
What she didn’t realize was the ward had repeatedly been going through a process called “code census,” an overcrowding protocol that spills excess patients into the main hospital’s hallways, sets off bed bumping and is often a wider sign of a hospital beyond its capacity.
The overcapacity code — used widely across Canada under various names — allows a hospital emergency room to declare an “unsafe” situation and start shipping out patients to other floors.
The Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union brought the protocol to public prominence last month, releasing data showing that what was supposed to be an occasional measure to deal with ER overcrowding had become a regular event through the winter months at Halifax hospitals.
In the infirmary, the code was called 23 out of 31 days in January, including the days when Webb was there.
The data also provided a portrait of a hospital caught in a winter-time pressure cooker. Its ER was receiving the highest rate of patient visits — at times surging to about 250 patients per day — in over two years. Overall, the average number of patients showing up daily at emergency had gone up by about a quarter in eight years, from 161 to 204.
Dr. David Petrie, the co-lead of an emergency program planning committee with the province’s health authority, said in an interview that his hospital is facing a problem common in Canadian medicine — the reaching of capacity in terms of acute care beds.
“In order to work in a system like this you need 15 per cent search capacity. Your average day your occupancy should be 85 per cent (in the hospitals). We run our hospitals across the country at 90 per cent and sometimes at 100 per cent,” he said during an interview.
“We have hit that point where capacity is the issue.”
The hospital’s goal is to see seriously ill patients within an hour to an hour-and-a-half, he said.
“Seven hours in an ambulance hallway, we try to avoid that as often as possible. That’s where we struggle with our surge capacity ... That, any of us would agree, is not reasonable,” said Petrie.