Death of young mother sparks scrutiny of rising fatalities in N.S. emergency rooms
CBC
The death of a young mother in an Amherst, N.S. hospital, is renewing scrutiny of the province's health-care system, and how emergency departments are functioning under the strain of staffing shortages and overcrowded waiting rooms.
On Dec. 31, 37-year-old Allison Holthoff waited more than six hours to see a doctor at the Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre while she experienced excruciating pain in her abdomen.
Her husband drove her to the emergency department at 11 a.m. AT and she spent her time between a wheelchair and lying on the floor in the waiting room before she was brought to an exam room.
"At one point I even did go out and told them, 'She's not doing good, she says she's feeling like she's dying,' and nobody said or did anything," said her husband Gunter Holthoff.
After more time passed, the nurses prepared Allison for an X-ray, but her husband said she went into cardiac arrest before the test could be performed. She was resuscitated three times and later died in the intensive care unit.
Emergency room deaths are at a six-year high, according to figures shared with CBC News by the Nova Scotia NDP Caucus following a freedom of information request.
In 2022, 558 people in Nova Scotia died in emergency departments, up from 505 in 2021 and 393 in 2020.
"Any time we have numbers that are going up … it's deeply concerning," said Susan Leblanc, MLA for Dartmouth North and NDP health spokesperson.
"We know that people are waiting for long, long waits in the emergency departments … so when the waits end in a death, it's obviously the worst case scenario."
The number of deaths compared to patients is still extremely low, at 0.12 per cent. But the percentage was at its highest in 2022 compared to the previous five years.
Late last week, CBC News asked Nova Scotia Health for the number of deaths that have occurred in emergency departments in the province. The department declined, citing privacy rules.
The president-elect of Doctors Nova Scotia said deaths in emergency rooms do not necessarily mean a person didn't receive adequate care.
"Often people are going to emergency departments because they've got life-threatening things going on, like heart attacks, or seriously injured in an accident," said Dr. Colin Audain, anesthesia site chief for the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax. "I think it's fair to say that health care in general is in a bit of a crisis and that the emergency department is sort of the ground zero."
Almost 130,000 Nova Scotians don't have a family doctor. Audain said this means more people go to the emergency department and cause backlogs.