WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Sept. 25) -- Canadian officials want to know why a wheelchair-bound man waited for 34 hours in a Winnipeg hospital's emergency waiting room before dying from a bladder infection, according to CBC News and CTV News.
Staffers at Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba found Brian Sinclair, 45, dead after midnight Sunday, but officials said he apparently died some time before then. Sinclair had not been able to urinate for 24 hours due to a block in his catheter, leading to his death, said Dr. Thambirajah Balachandra, the province's chief medical examiner. Balachandra has called for an inquest into Sinclair's death.
Sinclair's family has reacted with shock and outrage. "He's my blood," his cousin Robert Sinclair told CBC News. "I don't like to see any of my blood relatives die for no reason and I believe that.… It was for no reason. The guy sat there for 34 hours for what reason?" Get the full story from CBC News.
In June, surveillance footage showed a woman collapsing in a New York hospital waiting room and dying as staffers failed to help for more than an hour. Esmin Green, 49, had been waiting in the emergency room for nearly 24 hours on June 19 when she fell on the floor. Watch video from that incident below.
Looks like a simple matter of the guy being too "inept" to register when he arrived. Hospital staff don't know if someone sitting in ER is there as a patient or waiting on a friend.
Also, inability to urinate doesn't seem to be that high a priority as far triagers are concerned. I remember having a sphyncter malfunction and having to wait the longest (painful) time for a catherization in ER. The 800 mls was a great strain on the bladder. I subsequently bought a plastic cathether for a dollar, "sterilize" it and fingers in salt solution and rinse in freshly boiled water then empty bladder in a minute. I even "fished out" a little "rock" that jammed in the eye of the catheter. The catheter can scratch the ureathra either at the "loop" or the sphyncter which will cause bleeding; in my mcase it occurs after eating something with sugar, but I seem to be able to mitigate this with red grapes. Thinking there might be more rocks in the bladder I cut off the bullet-shaped end of the catheter (to have a larger entry point); no rocks but lots of temporary bleeding. Actually probably the most effective way to get hospital staff to make frequent checks on waiting-room patients is for the homeless to come in for the night there instead of sleeping in dumpsters, under the bridge or on city buses. Once staff glom onto this they'll be checking up frequently on patients in the waiting room. Sort of a Rube Goldberg solution but hey, if it works...