SASKATOON (CP) - A Saskatchewan family is furious that their 84-year-old father had to wait more than two days in a crowded and noisy emergency room before he was admitted to hospital for bleeding in his brain.
Halldor Gundmundson fell at his Saskatoon retirement home on Tuesday and was taken by ambulance to Royal University Hospital - the province's busiest emergency room.
His daughter Arlene Mitschke said he was looked at by doctors right away and diagnosed rather quickly. But it ended up taking 52 hours to find him a bed in the neurosurgery ward.
"It was packed and there were people everywhere," Mitschke said. "It was loud and you can't turn the lights off.
"It was very traumatic for him, very hard on him. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't rest, he couldn't get comfortable. It would be like working at your office 24 hours a day with all the noise going off and phones ringing and all that activity without getting any actual downtime."
Gundmundson, a widowed father of four who served with the army in the Second World War, is now resting in hospital while his family decides the best course of treatment.
Mitschke was quick to praise the staff at the hospital, saying they were doing the best that they could under very busy circumstances.
She said the buck stops with the provincial government for not providing the staff with the proper resources to do their jobs.
"He was given good medical care. The point is he couldn't get a bed," Mitschke said.
"I think that our health minister should account for the fact that there is a 52-hour wait for an 84-year-old veteran. I think the premier of Saskatchewan should be held accountable for that."
Inquiries to the government were deferred to the Saskatoon Health Region.
Spokeswoman Jean Morrison said that when a neurosurgery bed was not available, the decision was made to keep Gundmundson in the emergency room because that was the second-best place he could get treatment.
"The place where he could most appropriately get care was in the emergency department," Morrison told reporters.
"It's unfortunate. We wish that patients didn't have to stay in emergency - sometimes for longer than we would like.
"It's unusual for someone to have to wait 52 hours to get a bed outside of emergency."
This is not the first time the emergency department at Royal University Hospital has come under scrutiny.
Last year, the department's director, Dr. Jon Witt, wrote to Health Minister John Nilson to say he and other doctors felt patients had died or had become permanently disabled because they waited too long to see an emergency doctor.
After Witt's letter became public, the health region gave the doctors a pay raise and agreed to hire more doctors to increase ER coverage.
Less than two months later, Witt was fired from his administrative duties. He has said he was demoted because he spoke out, but hospital officials have said there were other issues.
The cases Witt drew attention to and Gundmundson's case differ in some respects.
Mitschke points out that her father was seen right away by emergency room staff.
It was finding a bed in the hospital that was the problem.
