Quebec doctor who had patient die in front of him after waiting 16 hours in ER speaks out

With ongoing overcrowding issues in ERs across Quebec – one doctor is sounding the alarm – taking to Twitter to describe his experience of having a patient die in front of him after he waited 16 hours in emergency. We spoke to Dr. Sébastien Marin, an ER doctor at the Barrie Memorial Hospital in Ormstown, about what happened and why it was important for him to speak out.

Can you start by telling us what happened to this man?

The patient came to the hospital with back pain. He presented at a hospital. He was triaged. There was a very, very long way, a lot of people, so he was sent to the waiting room. The patient waited for multiple hours and at the end of the evening, he was tired, so decided to go home to try to have a bit of sleep. The patient didn’t sleep all night. Came to my emergency early in the morning. Our triage nurse put the patient in the room and I saw the patient immediately. I was worried about an aortic dissection, which is when the aorta starts splitting open. I started preparing for tests and suddenly the patient collapsed and died in front of me.

How do you feel as a doctor to be in a situation like that where you could help someone, but because of our current strained system, you couldn’t?

It’s always frustrating to have a patient come in alive and die under your care, but it’s even more frustrating when you know the patient did the right thing and went to the hospital and just didn’t receive timely treatment for his condition.

Barrie Memorial Hospital in Ormstown, Quebec Oct. 26, 2022 (CREDIT: Martin Daigle/CityNews)

Do you feel that if he would have seen a doctor sooner that he would have had a chance?

He certainly would have had a chance. We can never guarantee that a patient will survive anything. However, there’s treatments for what he had. We can slow down the dissection. The patients get surgery. There’s treatments for the methodology he died from.

J’ai terminé ma nuit sur un patient qui est décédé devant moi avec une aorte thoracique qui a rompu

Ce meme patient avait attendu 16h hier dans un autre hopital sans être vu pour sa douleur. Il est parti

Moi je n’ai rien pu faire, il est décédé dans les minutes après son arrivé

— Sébastien Marin (@SebMarinMD) October 22, 2022

If we look at the ERs right now across the province, bursting at the seams, do you fear that something like this could happen again? Are patients at risk?

Patients are certainly at risk. I never named which hospital the patient went to because it’s not a specific hospital problem. There’s five, six, seven hospitals in the Greater Montreal Area that are living with the same problematic that hospital has. There’s hospitals in other regions also that have the same problematic where patients are just waiting too long. It was a problem waiting to happen. And, a lot of my colleagues, which I spoke to, said they’ve been speaking up about this for months and months and nothing’s changing. So that’s the reason why I came out with the case of a death. I think it was important to speak up.

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