Daughter of missing senior with dementia calls for review of his disappearance

It's been five months since Britt Moberg's father Earl — who lives with dementia — went missing, but she's not ready to give up.

She feels it meets the criteria for a critical incident and has contacted the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, asking for a review of his disappearance.

"My father at this point, he is presumed to be deceased although we haven't found his body," Moberg said. "We know that it wasn't a natural death and wandering is a common progression of that illness, but it doesn't need to result in someone dying from that."

Provincial legislation defines a critical incident as "an unintended event that occurs when health services are provided to an individual and results in a consequence to him or her that is serious and undesired, and does not result from the individual's underlying health condition or from a risk inherent in providing the health services."

A patient safety pamphlet on the province's website offers examples of critical incidents, such as receiving the wrong medicine or wrong dose of a medicine that results in serious patient harm.

In her family's case, Moberg said she thinks it would've been helpful to have an occupational therapist come to her father's home, do an assessment around risk, and talk to his wife — Earl's caregiver — about tracking devices that might be options. 

She said having professionals come to a person's home and provide hands-on support would be beneficial.

"My mom did find one device on her own, but we do know that there are limitations for all of those things and for my father, he could take it off and lose things and change his clothes," she said.

"So we know that multiple strategies for tracking are really needed as well as part of a robust safety plan for people."

Her father also waited months to access a single day of day programming, then had to wait more for another one. She said the day Earl went missing was his first day of home care.

"There wasn't any choice or availability for that to align with when my mom actually left for work," she said. "If she had some choice around that, that's obviously when she would have chosen to have the home care come." 

Earl went missing on Dec. 12, 2023. His brother Doug said at the time police tracked his last known location to Bunn's Creek Centennial Park on McIvor Avenue using his cellphone signal data. 

Moberg along with members of the Bear Clan and community continued the search Sunday, starting at the Kildonan Church parking lot.

She also previously said in December she'd like the Silver Alert system, which notifies the public about missing vulnerable adults, to include a text to people's cell phones in the area. Since then she's been connecting with her local MLA and the Manitoba Alzheimer's Society about that.

"It's not just around having silver alerts on phones, we want to be able to prevent people from ending up in the position of needing to have a silver alert call in the first place." 

Moberg wants the public to remain vigilant for her father and to remember he still hasn't been found. 

"It's been incredibly difficult," she said.

"Every day we're waiting to see whether he's going to be found and I think there are a lot of looking at what happened, the chain of events, and seeing what can be learned from this in order to prevent this from happening to anybody else."