WRHA apologizes to family

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This article was published 06/04/2016 (3807 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The CEO of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority acknowledged Wednesday the family of a Winnipeg woman who died after being left to lie on an emergency room floor has waited too long for answers.

The admission came a day after NDP Leader Greg Selinger called on the WRHA to provide information on the death of Mohinder Singh.

WRHA president and CEO Milton Sussman said the family of the 57-year-old hospital cleaner shouldn’t have had to wait more than five months for a review of her death Oct. 15, 2015, to be completed by the WRHA.

Sussman said a review process, while not complete, has determined the emergency room staffing at Seven Oaks was sufficient the day Singh was admitted. But they will look into the issue of availability of beds and CT scans.

“Clearly, something went wrong in this situation. It’s hard to determine yet what went wrong,” he said. “That’s what the critical incident review will tell us.”

Sussman spoke to the Free Press shortly after calling Singh’s husband and son, Darshan and Braham, to apologize for the lack of information surrounding the death of their mother.

Singh was rushed by paramedics to Seven Oaks General Hospital Oct. 14, 2015, after collapsing in the doorway of her bathroom.

She had been experiencing a severe headache.

At the hospital, the family was told no CT scan was available. Neither was a bed. So Mohinder was eventually forced to lie on the waiting room floor.

Repeated pleas from Darshan to staff to look at his wife were ignored. She lost consciousness two hours later. That prompted an emergency CT scan, which revealed a brain hemorrhage and extensive damage.

Singh died in Health Sciences Centre the next day in a room she often used to clean. She never regained consciousness.

The family was interviewed a few weeks later as part of the review process. But repeated attempts to ask the WRHA for findings weren’t successful.

“It’s a terrible thing that happened,” Sussman said. “I can certainly understand their frustration and not getting any answers. It’s our commitment to get them those answers.”

Sussman vowed to the Singh family Wednesday to present them with finding from the critical incident review on April 15.

Sussman said the incident has prompted the WRHA to “escalate” and “accelerate” the review process. That means no review will take longer than 88 days from the time a file is opened. And if any reviews are falling behind, “that will be brought to the attention of leadership to put in the resources to help complete them.”

“We had started a review of our whole CI process,” he said. “There’s been a number of situations where families have expressed concern about the length of time that it’s taken and getting the answers they were looking for.

“But when this situation came forward, we felt we needed to act more quickly.”

When a reporter noted undue delays could result in skepticism about the process by families, Sussman replied: “That’s why we’re really trying to address change. We want to learn from what happened, but we also want to provide families with answers to their questions that they have. I recognize… that we haven’t done that as effectively as we should. This situation highlights that even more, and it’s something we have to fix.

“We need to be more transparent. Manitobans deserve that. Families deserve that. They’re entitled to get that.”

That transparency includes media requests, Sussman noted.

When the Free Press contacted the WRHA Friday after being approached by the Singh family, a reporter was told of an existing policy that forbids the authority from confirming Singh was a patient or a subject of a critical incident review.

“That was a mistake,” Sussman admitted. “There’s no getting around it. We should have acknowledged she was our patient and that a critical incident review was taking place. That will change.”

Singh’s son, Braham, said the family appreciated Sussman’s apology, but said they are more focused on getting answers as to what happened to Singh at the hospital.

“We started this for answers,” the son said.

“We didn’t do this (go public) to get apologies from a CEO that wasn’t involved. We want to know why she was left there to die in pain.”

randy.turner@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @randyturner15