A 94-year-old Montreal woman waited more than eight hours for paramedics to arrive after falling in her bathroom earlier this week.
Officials blame an unusually high number of calls on Monday – 30 per cent more than usual -- for the delay. They also admit in hindsight that the woman’s call should’ve been treated as a higher priority.
Grace Piccione lost feeling in her legs while walking to the bathroom and fell. Her son-in-law was home at the time and immediately called 911.
That was at 8:45 a.m. The ambulance didn’t arrive until 5:30 p.m.
Piccione’s daughter, Irene Piccione, said she called back four times asking when paramedics would show up. Each time, she says, she got the same answer: “We don’t know.”
“She said, ‘I’m sore from head to toe, what can I do, I’d be better off dead’ -- all things like that. I tried to calm her down,” Piccione said.
The elderly woman lay on the bathroom floor the entire time because it was too risky to move her, Piccione said.
“My husband lifted her. The end result was she had sore ribs, and he had a very sore back. We were told not to lift her, to call for help,” she said.
Urgences-sante, Montreal’s emergency medical services provider, said it was overwhelmed by a high number of calls that day.
Chief of operations Benoit Garneau said the call wasn’t categorized as an emergency, but it should’ve been given a higher priority.
“An urgent call is when people have a problem breathing, when people are unconscious on the floor, we have to make it fast,” he said.
“Unfortunately there are calls that have to wait. This is one of these calls.”
Garneau insisted that the problem at hand is not a lack of ambulances or paramedics. Instead, he blamed the triage method.
“It could happen again. I’m telling you, it can happen again. But we’re doing things to change our process,” he said.
Grace Piccione is waiting for a medical evaluation in hospital. Meanwhile, her daughter says she’s still perplexed by the paramedics’ slow response.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
With files from CTV Montreal
