"We have ownership once he walks through the door and it's our responsibility to ensure he gets the treatment he's entitled to. We failed in that responsibility."
Today at 4.30 PM, The Great Canadian Talk Show will bring exclusive details about an earlier case, in which medical file entries prove that not only does the HSC lose track of patients on the way in, they lose track of them on the way out.
Spurred by our coverage of the Sinclair affair and cover-up, a Winnipeg family brought their story to TGCTS.
On October 19, 2004 the family was told that 45 year old Gail Glesby was 'discharged', in spite of their concerns she had deteriorated after a relatively simple diagnostic procedure at the hospital the day before. When pressed for how their mother left the hospital as the family was not called to pick her up, "they said they didn't know and said we're busy and good-bye".
As her daughter searched for her, frantic she was on the mean city streets or at the Main Street Project, the hospital staff had "discharged her chart" but NOT Gail Glesby.
She was left strapped into a wheelchair and parked in a hallway.
It tooks about 3 hours before a message was left on the answering machine that "my mother was still at the hospital."
The file also shows that in her tragic case, the urgency to rush the patient out of the ER to free up bedspace may have contributed to her death.
A doctor who works for the WRHA and is a listener of Kick-FM, discovered obvious clues that Gail Glesby was slowly dying -- and that accusations by nurses she "faked a seizure" and was just an attention-seeking alcoholic trying to make herself vomit, demonstrated a "tunnel-vision" that ignored obvious signs of a slow bleeding into the brain.
The review by our doctor also reveals, that her falling and hitting her head in the ER bathroom 2 hours before her 'discharge' - downplayed by HSC staff as a "faked seizure" - was a sign of Gail Glesby suffering the effects the slow brain bleed, and that staff ignored symptoms that the fall has made her condition even worse.
A CT scan, finally ordered by a doctor 12 hours after the fall after a heated argument with the family, revealed the irreversible traumatic head injury.
Yet at the same time, HSC staff was still planning to discharge Gail Glesby as though she were only a mental case, and not a woman dying, in part, from the neglect of HSC staff.
A post-mortem report report stated that the fall in the bathroom was "the most likely explanation (for) accidental brain trauma" that ultimately killed Gail Glesby.
After learning of the concerns of our consulting doctor about how Gail Glesby was treated, her family emailed HSC Chief Operating Officer Adam Topp asking for a file review, for the family to be interviewed about the case, for new procedures to prevent a similar tragedy, and for an apology about how Gail was left helpless in a wheelchair.
