Winnipeg Regional Health Authority: No One To Blame For 36-Hour Wait in ER Death

After waiting for 34 hours in a Winnipeg emergency room Brian Sinclair died untreated. The death was at the root of many headlines. The fact that no one is being disciplined for his death will create many more.

The employees at the Winnipeg hospital never 'knew' that the man who many spoke to was in need of care. He never signed in to be triaged. For that failure Sinclair died at the hospital waiting to be seen of a treatable bladder infection. Sinclair sat in the waiting room is his wheelchair, both legs already removed because of frostbite. When the doctors finally examined him he had been dead for several hours. The medical examiner has called for a formal inquest into the homeless man's death. It appears that even though no one person is to blame for Sinclair's death the emergency department's protocol will be changing. From now on before being allowed into the waiting room anyone arriving at any of the six emergency centres in Winnipeg will be electronically registered. A staff member will also canvas the waiting room so that each patient will be talked to each four hours. Non-emergency patients will be sent to other areas of the hospital so that triage nurses only deal with true emergencies. To be fair to the hospital the homeless often use hospital emergency waiting rooms as a shelter from the cold and bad weather in downtown areas. To combat this problem some hospitals have added shelters. Winnipeg is now looking into this possibility for its hospitals. The Canadian Press reports:

"The majority of the changes that we've made at HSC are intended to ... ensure that every patient that comes into the emergency room is triaged and we actually know that they are there for care," said Adam Topp, chief operating officer of the Health Sciences Centre.

"That is the key gap that occurred in Mr. Sinclair's case."

Sinclair had been sent to the hospital by taxi on September 19. On September 21 he was examined and pronounced dead. He was spoken to during his 36 hours in pain by housekeeping and security guards but not once by a nurse or doctor. At the time of Sinclair's death the hospital was not short staffed.