A 92-year-old woman has died in Cape Breton, N.S. after being transported from one hospital to another in a taxi, prompting her family to file a formal complaint against the Nova Scotia Health Authority.

When Freda Young started feeling ill on Oct. 1, her son Joe Young drove her to Glace Bay Hospital. The family’s nearest emergency room -- a 20-minute drive away in Waterford, N.S. -- was closed.

Young’s mother spent several hours at Glace Bay Hospital, with pain in her chest and arm only getting worse. The hospital’s ER was about to close for the day, and Young was told his mother would have to go to Cape Breton Regional Hospital in Sydney.

“They said . . . ‘We’ll be sending you by taxi,’” Young told CTV Atlantic. “I said, ‘Well, why?’ . . . And they said, ‘Well, there's no ambulances available.’”

Young’s mother died after suffering multiple heart attacks at Cape Breton Regional Hospital. The 66-year-old said that he feels the stress had a negative effect on her health.

“I feel that her life the last few days could’ve been much better,” Young said. “Because she thought it was terrible to be put in a taxi to take her from one hospital to the other. And when she was left sitting in a wheelchair in Glace Bay, she even said ‘I guess I’m going to die in a wheelchair.’”

Young later found out that ambulances were in fact available on the day his mother was transferred by taxi, as confirmed by an EHS Canada spokesperson. 

By then Young and his family had already begun filing a formal complaint with help from NDP MLA Tammy Martin.

Martin says the incident should be addressed to ensure it “never happens to somebody else again.”

“Secondly, [so] someone will wake up and hear us finally,” Martin told CTV Atlantic. “Because of the lack of attention to this healthcare crisis, we have patients, residents of Nova Scotia, now dying.” 

Rallies in protest of doctor shortages, hospital closures, and, lengthy wait times have been going on for months in Nova Scotia, but the provincial government still says there isn’t a state of crisis. 

“While there are opportunities to present where there may be challenges in the health care system, there are many, many areas where it’s operating very well for Nova Scotians,” Randy Delorey, Nova Scotia’s health minister, told CTV Atlantic.

Delorey says he’s looking into what happened to Young, and so far has only received preliminary information.

With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Kyle Moore