(June 16, 2024) By: Samantha Beattie, Ethan Lang, CBC News<\/p>\n
CJohn Zammit, 88, died in a Welland, Ont., emergency department after experiencing a brief illness<\/p>\n
As her father laid sick on a gurney in a Niagara-area emergency room, Ann-Marie Zammit reassured him he’d recover.<\/p>\n
The medical staff at the Welland, Ont., hospital had told her despite an infection and being in the emergency department for days, CJohn didn’t have a fever, his vitals were stable and they’d be conducting more tests the next morning, Zammit told CBC Hamilton in an interview.<\/p>\n
She had reason to be hopeful. Before his illness, CJohn, 88, lived independently and was his happy, healthy and quirky self, she said.<\/p>\n
But that night at the hospital, CJohn insisted he wasn’t going to survive the night.<\/p>\n
“He told me his final wishes and I’m like, ‘Dad, we’re not going to need this because you are going to pull through,'” Zammit said.<\/p>\n
The next morning, June 1, Zammit got a call from the hospital. Her dad had died.<\/p>\n
“And it was unbelievable because they’d kept telling me that his vitals are stable, his vitals are stable,” she said. “Then I got a call from the doctor and he said this was very surprising news.”<\/p>\n
Zammit doesn’t know what caused her father’s death but pointed to the lack of resources at the hospital as significant factors. For example, he’d stayed in the emergency department for several days because there weren’t any beds available in other departments to move him to.<\/p>\n
“This broken system killed my father,” she said.<\/p>\n
Hearings taking place across Ontario<\/strong><\/p>\n Zammit shared her experience at a public hearing in Welland last weekend organized by the Ontario Health Coalition.<\/p>\n The coalition, which advocates for improvements to the public health-care system, is documenting experiences like Zammit’s at hearings around rural Ontario this month. With input from opposition critics, the network of over 400 grassroots organizations wants to draft recommendations on how to improve local hospitals, especially in rural areas.<\/p>\n The group hopes to provide those recommendations to the province in a report later this fall.<\/p>\n Executive director Natalie Mehra said it will follow their report last year, which recorded almost 1,200 emergency room closures in the province.<\/p>\n “The goal is to push the Ford government and stop them from continuing to shut down and dismantle public health services and sort of destroy them through privatization,” Mehra said.<\/p>\n The province says it’s looking at all options to resource hospitals around Ontario.<\/p>\n In an emailed statement this week, Hannah Jensen, a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones, said Ontario “is taking bold action to connect more people to the care they need, when they need it.”<\/p>\n The province is budgeted to spend $85 billion on health care this year, she noted.<\/p>\n Zammit\u00a0said she\u00a0didn’t see that funding reflected on the ground.<\/p>\n Staff at Welland Hospital seemed stretched thin, she said, and different doctors came to see her father, providing different “patchwork” diagnoses.<\/p>\n CJohn, a diabetic, could barely eat when he was admitted to hospital.\u00a0Still, it took two days for the hospital to provide him with liquid food, Zammit said, and only after she’d pushed\u00a0for it.<\/p>\n While CJohn was wheeled into a small room, the\u00a0emergency department’s hallways were filled with patients on gurneys, Zammit said.<\/p>\n “I felt like we were in some sort of field hospital in the middle of the war,” she said. “They have no ability to call for the nurse. They just have to yell.”<\/p>\n