The family of a 73-year-old woman in the Montreal area is angry with staff at a local hospital, complaining the senior was yelled at simply because she asked for help in English.
Harriet Coveyduck, an English-speaking Irish immigrant who suffers from emphysema, sought medical care at Verdun Hospital last week when she contracted the flu. Her daughter Lorie Martin came to visit her on Sunday, and says she was stunned to find her mother facing the window and crying.
Coveyduck explained to her daughter that she had just asked a worker who entered her room for help and that led to an argument, with the worker eventually refusing to help the woman.
“She yelled at her: ‘If you can't speak French, we're not going to offer you any services’,” Martin told CTV Montreal.
Martin, who is fully bilingual, said she marched down the hallway to demand to see a supervisor and to ask why her mother had been treated that way.
“That's when she told me: ‘This is a French hospital and English isn't a priority’,” Martin said.
This isn’t the first time the Verdun Hospital has found itself in hot water over language issues.
Just last year, a Montreal-area man told CTV News that not only was he unable to get services in English for his 90-year-old father at the hospital, the staff insulted him for the quality of his own French.
There was a similar complaint in 2014 about a nurse at the hospital who also refused to speak English.
Patients' rights advocate Paul Brunet says the health authority that runs the hospital must follow the law, and that law says that acute care units throughout Quebec must offer services and health care in French and English.
On Wednesday, Annie Charbonneau, a spokesperson from CIUSSS Centre-Sud, the health authority that runs the hospital, sent CTV News a statement saying it is investigating. The statement reads:
“We sincerely regret the difficult situation that occurred with this patient. Verdun hospital employees, while offering services in French, do respect the right for each allophone or English-speaking person to receive services in their own language, according to the Health and Social Service Act. Management and personnel subscribe entirely to this orientation.”
The health authority says it is also in the process of updating the list of English services in all its institutions. Employees will receive related training.
Martin, who has been invited to meet with administrators later this week, says she is happy she's being heard but still upset on behalf of her mother.
“It's heartbreaking for my mom to have to go through this while she's sick,” she said.
With a report from CTV Montreal’s Cindy Sherwin
