Lawsuit alleges Ontario man died after given 10 times prescribed dose in hospital
CTV
Angela Salvatore had been away from her father's hospital bedside for just over an hour when she says she got a frantic call from a nurse, pleading with her to calm him down.
Angela Salvatore had been away from her father's hospital bedside for just over an hour when she says she got a frantic call from a nurse, pleading with her to calm him down.
After she rushed back to his room, she alleges ashen-faced staff delivered an alarming message: her father had mistakenly been given 10 times the prescribed dose of an antipsychotic drug.
As the night went on, Salvatore says she and her mother watched helplessly as her father, Benito Salvatore, went through waves of confusion, agitation and eventually delirium. Then, less than 12 hours after the hospital's call, his heart stopped, she says. He couldn't be revived.
"We were numb. We were completely numb," Angela Salvatore said in an interview last week. "The loss is unquantifiable and the grief is profound."
Now, she says she wants accountability for what happened to her father, an Italian immigrant who came to Canada as a young man in the 1960s.
In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, the family alleges Benito Salvatore suffered severe pain and shock, and ultimately died prematurely on July 31 due to negligence that led to a series of medical errors and failures.
It alleges, among other things, that nurses failed to properly confirm the prescribed dosage and doctors downplayed the seriousness of the alleged error, failing to recognize that "it was a potentially fatal, life-threatening" one.
