Dying husband's stay at Halifax hospitals 'inhumane': widow

A Nova Scotia woman is upset about the treatment she and her dying husband received when he was a patient at Capital Health hospitals in Halifax.

Veronica Ratchford took her husband David to the ER at the Halifax Infirmary on Friday, June 19.  He’d had chronic lymphatic leukemia for nine years and had just developed pneumonia.

Ratchford says he had difficulty breathing.

“I said my husband is very sick and I'm not taking him home,” Ratchford remembers.  “I said I can't take care of him at home, he's too sick.”

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David Ratchford was admitted to the ER but doctors there decided he should be transferred to a private room in the Victoria General Hospital where he could receive more specialized care.

When he was transferred to the VG, Ratchford says staff weren’t prepared for him and there was no private room available.

He was eventually put in a ward with two other patients.

They had his dead body in the private room that we couldn't get while he was alive.- Veronica Ratchford

“He needed to be in a private room because of his immune system and because of the condition he was in,” Ratchford said.

Ratchford said there was a private room near the nursing floor where her husband was staying, but she couldn’t persuade staff to transfer him.

“I was desperate. I was crying, I wanted to pay for the room, whatever,” she said. “Because in that ward, they told us that we couldn't be with him after 9 o'clock at night, because there were two other people in there.”

Ratchford said her husband remained highly agitated.

Husband died alone

"He kept saying, ‘Am I dying?  Am I dying?’  And of course, for me to answer was like, ‘No’.”

Ratchford went home the two evenings her husband stayed in hospital. His two daughters remained, but were not allowed to stay at his bedside past 9 p.m.  They slept in a family room in another part of the hospital.

One of the daughters slipped back into the ward to sit beside her father. But when a nurse discovered her after midnight, she was ordered out of the room. 

“About an hour later, or sometime in that time frame, the nurse went to the family room where his two daughters were,” Ratchford recalls.

“And she told them that they went in the room and he had passed away.”

Ratchford became very emotional as she thought of her husband’s final hours. 

“And they called me, and I almost lost my frigging mind, because they kept saying he was stable and I kept saying how sick he was,” she said.

Relatives rushed Ratchford to the hospital. “And you know where he was?,” she asks. “He was in the private room. They had his dead body in the private room, the room that we couldn't get while he was alive.”

Ratchford says her husband did not receive continuity of care.  She lost track of the number of nurses and doctors she dealt with over his final weekend.

Searching for answers

She says she isn’t looking for any sort of compensation from the hospital, but she does want them to change their ways.

"That's inhumane. I never wanted my husband to die alone," she said.

“I want answers as to why they treated my husband that way and did not provide, to me, adequate care to him... And also, the main thing is that I want them to make changes.  To acknowledge the fact that it's a human being there. It's a person. It's somebody's husband, it's somebody's father. It's somebody's relative that's loved so dearly by the family."

Capital Health will not speak directly to the Ratchfords' case, citing patient confidentiality.

"For this particular family, I'm sorry that from their perspective that the experience was not what they had hoped for, especially for their family member's end of life,” said Victoria Sullivan, director of the Victoria General site.

"It's very important for us to hear from patients and families when their experiences hasn't gone well,” Sullivan said.  “So if there is improvements we need to make then we will make those improvements.”

Ratchford says she met with representatives of Capital Health last month.

She says they took lots of notes and promised to meet with her family again. That second meeting hasn’t happened.