A London, Ont., man died in hospital after spending five days in Mexico waiting for a bed closer to home. His son says the delay highlights a disturbing shortage of intensive care beds.
Stuart Cline, 71, was vacationing in Puerto Vallarta last month when he suffered a burst blood vessel. He was rushed into surgery in a Mexican hospital.
After he was stabilized, he languished for five days before he was flown to St. Catharines, Ont., on March 1. He died in St. Catharines, which is about 200 kilometres from his home.
His son, David Cline, tells CTV News Channel that he believes his father should have received a bed in Ontario, “if not the first day, definitely the second day.”
Cline says his wife, who is from Mexico and speaks Spanish, flew to Mexico immediately after the injury and was there working with doctors and the insurance company to try to arrange for a bed in Ontario’s public health system, but they “just kept getting told, ‘No, maybe tomorrow.’”
“I can assure you the insurance companies were calling lots of hospitals every single day,” he said. “They were very diligent. Every day, we had new hopes that he was going to be going.”
Cline says he isn’t sure if the outcome would have been different had his father been brought back to Canada sooner, but he says that his father had been “moving” in Mexico but “there was nothing” after he got home.
According to Cline, his father’s MPP New Democrat Peggy Sattler “spoke some truth” when she said in a widely-shared Facebook post that the province’s hospital bed system shouldn’t be at 100 per cent capacity.
In the post, Sattler wrote that she had “failed him” because despite her “urgent appeals” to the health minister, “the Liberal government refused to intervene to help bring Stuart home from Mexico.”
“Rather than blaming the insurance company for failing to find a bed --- when hospitals in London and across the province daily operate at well over 100 per cent occupancy -- the premier must accept responsibility for creating this crisis,” the MPP added. “Insurers can’t locate a bed if a bed does not exist.”
Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Interim Leader Vic Fedeli echoed Sattler’s sentiments in daily question period at Queen’s Park on Monday.
“This tragedy is a direct result of this government’s refusal to properly fund hospitals across this province,” Fedeli said in a question to Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne.
“How is this government preventing a similar tragedy from happening again?” Fedeli demanded.
“I completely agree with the member opposite that this was a tragedy, that this is a situation that should not have arisen,” Wynne responded.
“When Ontarians travel abroad they take the safe decision, I hope, to purchase travel insurance and that will allow them to get the care that they need,” Wynne said. “That is our expectation, as well that the insurance company and the health system would work together ... I think that we need collectively to ask serious questions about what happened here.”
Wynne then read off the numbers of intensive care beds she says were available in various parts of southern Ontario on Feb. 26, including 85 spread out across Hamilton, Niagara, Toronto and other areas.
“The question is, what was the disconnect in that conversation between the insurer and the health system?” the premier went on. “The beds were available. The system was working in the sense that the beds were there, there were vacancies, they were available, so why did that happen? I don’t have the answer.”
Ontario’s Auditor General looked at data from three hospitals in 2014-15 and found that 10 per cent of patients in emergency rooms waited 17 hours or longer to be admitted to intensive care.
