Winnipeg woman says 'awful' stay at Grace Hospital ER led her to start online petition

Shawna Forester Smith says a life-threatening experience at a Winnipeg hospital led her to start a petition to draw attention to the state of health care in Manitoba.

Forester Smith, 41, was diagnosed with gastroparesis and pseudo-obstruction in 2009. It means that her intestines don't work properly and she gets her nutrition through an intravenous line.

While she is currently a resident of the chronic care unit at the long-term care facility Deer Lodge Centre, her health condition requires her to frequent hospitals for emergency care, with the last time occurring over three days in the first weekend of March, she said.

"I started going septic [and] into shock, so they called an ambulance and I was taken to the Grace Hospital," Forester Smith said.

"And what I experienced was just awful."

Forester Smith says the Grace's emergency room was packed and the number of people waiting for a bed was "insane." Staff also couldn't say when she would get a bed, which troubled her since she can only be fed through an intravenous line.

"So, I'm fighting a life-threatening infection, I have sepsis and I'm not getting any nutrition."

When she did get a bed, Forester Smith says staff were too overwhelmed with patients to dispense her scheduled medications on time, leaving her in pain for most of her stay.

"My nurse had nine patients. How do you look after nine patients in the ER when all of them are really, really sick?" she said.

"I listened to somebody's IV pump alarm for … over eight hours, so for over eight hours somebody wasn't getting their IV fluids or whatever medication they were supposed to be getting, because I listened to that pump beep and nobody went and fixed it until the next shift. Like it was insane."

Forester Smith says there were a number of issues with the care she received at the Grace ER, but she doesn't blame the staff because "they couldn't do a better job [since] there were too many patients, and there just wasn't enough time."

Waits 'difficult and frustrating': WRHA

She started a petition to call for government, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and Shared Health to address concerns facing Manitoba's health-care system, including staffing issues, excessive ER wait times and access blocks — when patients are admitted with no beds available.

A WRHA spokesperson thanked Forester Smith for her advocacy in a Tuesday statement to CBC News.

"We share her concern about wait times and access block and know that waiting for hours for care in our emergency departments and urgent care centres is difficult and frustrating," the spokesperson said.

Work also continues to address staffing and patient care at Winnipeg hospitals, including 36 more acute care beds at St. Boniface Hospital and 31 new beds at the Grace, as well as a number of staff recruitment, retention and wellness programs, the spokesperson said.

The health authority wants to remind people to continue to seek help during emergencies by calling 911, or going to an emergency department or urgent care centre, where the sickest and most injured patients continue to be prioritized.

Ten per cent of patients at the Grace Hospital and Health Sciences Centre ERs waited about 12 hours for care in January, data from the WRHA shows. The same percentage of patients waited 16 hours for care that same month at the St. Boniface Hospital ER.

Forester Smith has been a "frequent flyer" at Winnipeg ERs since her 2009 diagnosis, but says she has never had an experience like her weekend at the Grace over those years.

"I was actually crying. I didn't want to go. I knew it was going to be a bad experience."

She felt sympathy for the nurses and health-care aides who were at her bedside, saying although they were overwhelmed, she "also got a sense of a lot of guilt."

"They knew that they were late with medication. They knew that I was waiting in pain. They knew that my dressing was soaked in bile and that the bile was eating the skin around my stomach, but they couldn't do anything about it," she said.

"We need to really act on this, because if we don't do something about this soon, it's going to get even worse. We're going to lose even more staff, and it's just going to keep spiraling out of control."