Family seeks answers in man’s May death at Edmonton hospital waiting room

A couple is looking for answers from Alberta Health Services after they say their son died in hospital waiting for care. CTV Edmonton's Connor Hogg reports.

An Edmonton family wants answers in the wake of a man’s death earlier this month at a hospital.

Allan and Penny Smith say they’re still struggling to find out what happened at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, where they say Allan’s 33-year-old son, Travis, died while waiting in its emergency department’s waiting room on May 8.

Smith is among several patients who’ve died in recent months while waiting for care at an Alberta hospital.

In December, 44-year-old Prashant Sreekumar died at the southside Grey Nuns Community Hospital after waiting nearly eight hours.

Earlier this year, Dr. Paul Parks, president-elect of the Alberta Medical Association’s section of emergency medicine, sent a letter to the province detailing another six deaths over a two-week period in January in Alberta emergency rooms.

Allan and Penny kept news of Travis’s death to themselves until media reports started to come out last week after the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) said an unnamed man died at the Royal Alex while awaiting care. They then decided it was time to share his story.

“He deserves to have some dignity and a name put to him,” Penny, Travis’s stepmother, told CTV News Edmonton on Thursday.

The Smiths say Travis was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 16.

He received provincial income support and lived in an apartment until he was evicted three years ago this month, after which he lived on the streets.

“Around West Edmonton Mall, because he used to hang out there, every time I was over there, I was looking over my shoulder trying to find him,” Allan said.

Penny said his disease “took over.”

“Sometimes, he was unapproachable,” she said. “Once he was out of his apartment, we didn’t know what to expect.”

The Smiths found out about Travis’s death from his mother, who called to tell them police informed her he had died from a drug overdose while at the Royal Alex.

They said they later found out it happened while he was waiting for care in the ER, and haven’t been able to get any official information about how it happened.

Now, the Smiths are pressing Alberta Health Services (AHS) for answers and to confirm Travis was the man in the ER’s waiting room who died.

“They are not telling us that that was Travis,” Penny said. “We have called patient relations. We’ve gone to the hospital. We’ve tried numerous times. They’ve called us back, and they will say, ‘This is private information for the patient and the family.’ Well, the patient is dead, and we’re the family.”

AHS told CTV News Edmonton it is looking into the matter.

Alberta’s government ordered a judge-led inquiry into Sreekumar’s death in January, and also announced it was creating a program in which physicians would help triage patients.

Dr. Brian Wirzba, the AMA’s president, said last week the program, meant to operate at up to eight major hospitals across the province, is still not in place. He said it’s one of the moves needed to help alleviate pressure on the hospital system.

“Across Alberta, emergency departments are under significant pressure with high patient volumes and increased acuity and complexity,” Wirzba told CTV News’s Alberta Primetime last week. “There’s a significant problem with flow through the emergency departments, and what ends up happening is patients wait in the waiting room far longer than they should. That’s really what the challenge is ... Death in the waiting room, delayed care because of long waits in the waiting room, really provides a significant burden on the frontline workers, on the triage nurses and physicians that work there. It’s really less than ideal.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Connor Hogg