Person died after being taken to closed ER, Manitoba's latest critical incident report says

A person in Manitoba died after they were turned away from an emergency department that was closed, the province says in a new report.

That individual had been escorted to the health-care facility. After learning it was closed, the patient was transported to the closest health-care facility, but did not survive.

The person's death is among several highlighted in Manitoba Health's latest critical incident report, which encompasses the final three months of 2020.

The quarterly reports note cases where people have suffered "serious and unintended harm" while receiving health care in the province. While they include short descriptions of each event, they do not provide identifying factors or specific locations.

A long-time advocate of rural health-care is disturbed to hear about the case of the person who died after being taken to an ER that was closed.

"I think we're going to hear more of that, in all honesty," said Dr. Jacobi Elliott, medical director at the medical clinic in Grandview, almost 300 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.

"The way I see the wind blowing, it feels to me this health transformation [is coming]," Elliott said.

She expects more and more rural communities could lose their emergency departments as health care is centralized in larger centres. Small communities in Westman deal with temporary periods — sometimes a night, a weekend, or longer — without an emergency department because of staffing shortages.

The latest critical incident report, published this week, does not reveal why the ER was temporarily closed on the day in question, or where it was located.

Extended ER closures are advertised within a community, but that doesn't mean the notice filters out to everybody in a community.

"Think about it — you close, it's four in the afternoon; where do you put the notice up? On Facebook? On the internet? In a newspaper?" Elliott said.

"How are people supposed to know what's open?"

The incidents in the province's critical incident reports are not reported to lay blame, but rather reveal what could be done differently and what improvements can be made.

In the latest report, 35 incidents are classified as deaths — a higher than usual number in the reports, which can largely be attributed to COVID-19.