Daughter wants answers after 84-year-old father with dementia wandered out of emergency room

By the time they found him, 84-year-old Glen Orvis had walked nine kilometres through the cold and snow wearing a pair of Dockers shoes.

Glen, who has dementia, had wandered off hours earlier on Thursday after being dropped off by an ambulance at Winnipeg's Concordia Hospital.

His daughter, a former health-care worker, said she knows how stressful a hospital setting can be. But Shelley Orvis wants answers — and changes that will prevent what happened to Glen from happening to someone else.

"I don't want to blame anybody. But on the other hand, somebody has to be responsible. Somebody has to take accountability for why he was there alone," she said.

"This ... could have turned out way worse than it did."

Shelley said her dad woke up that morning last week with a headache and a fever. After calling their doctor wondering what to do, her 81-year-old mom, Dora — Glen's wife of over 60 years, and his sole caregiver — was advised to call an ambulance to take him to get looked at.

But because of COVID-19 protocols, Dora wasn't allowed to ride with him. And by the time she was able to make her way to the hospital a few hours later, Glen was gone.

The hospital issued a code yellow alert for a missing patient and called police. Shelley put up a Facebook post that was shared more than 4,000 times. And the family drove around the city, peering over massive snow banks for any sign of Glen and fearing the worst.

About five hours later, a stranger who happened to see Shelley's Facebook post was on her way home from work when she noticed an elderly man falling down on the median on Main Street near Chief Peguis Trail. 

Luckily, Shelley said, the man knew his name when the stranger asked: Glen.

The woman who stopped, along with two other people, stayed with him until an ambulance arrived, giving him a blanket and a pair of mittens to warm up in the meantime, Shelley said.

"He doesn't know where he was going and why he was walking, but he did tell my mom that he knew that he needed to keep walking in order to stay warm," she said.

"That's really painful to hear, because it's something that shouldn't have happened."

A spokesperson for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, which runs Concordia Hospital, said it's made a request to investigate what happened as a potential critical incident.