A woman has claimed her sister’s 11 hour wait to see a doctor contributed to her death just hours later.
Marianne Porter, 58, died at Moncton Hospital in New Brunswick, Canada, on Saturday after she arrived at the emergency department with what she thought was a hernia.
Her condition began to deteriorate rapidly yet due to overcrowding, her sister Donna Bordage revealed doctors were unable to see to her for hours.
“She was having a hard time breathing, she was visibly uncomfortable, she couldn’t stand up, she couldn’t eat,” Ms Bordage told Canadian news site Global News.
Ms Bordage recorded footage of her sister struggling in pain while sat in the waiting room.
Ms Porter was eventually seen 11 hours after arriving, but it was too late.
The mother-of-three was in fact suffering from acute kidney failure and despite medical staff’s efforts to save her, she died just hours later.
Dr Serge Melanson, the president of the New Brunswick Medical Society and an ER doctor at the hospital, said there was a real issue with overcrowding in hospital waiting rooms and that the hospital’s staff were stretched to their limits.
“I think that is a clear example of demonstrating that there is a real human cost to the reality that we are living,” he told Global News.
“As much as we may look at the data in terms of numbers, in terms of wait times and percentages of hours, for example, at the end of the day, it is our patients and the community at large that we are failing by not meeting their needs in a more timely fashion.”
He said he had a considerable amount of “regret” when patients went hours before being seen.
