Parents rush their son to Ontario for emergency care after waiting 15 hours in Montreal hospital

Christos Lianos recovers from complications related to a burst appendix. Although a student in Montreal, he received care in Kingston, Ont.

That’s because his parents rushed him to his hometown after he waited 15 hours in the emergency room at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Lianos, 20, said he doesn’t like to think about what would have happened to him if he had stayed in Montreal, waiting for care that never seemed to come.

“If I had gone home or stayed, who knows how long in that waiting room, what could have happened to me?” He asked. “Would I be here today?”

It was mid-June when Lianos started having severe stomach pains and a high fever. He had been feeling free for a few days, but had experienced the worst on the night of June 14. So he called his parents.

“Automatically, my husband and I thought, ‘My God, that sounds like his appendix,'” says Niki Lianos, Christos’ mother.

3 hours drive for care

Niki Lianos told her son to go to the hospital immediately. And then she and her husband drove three hours from Kingston to be with him.

In the 15 hours he was in the hospital, which is part of the McGill University Health Center (MUHC), nurses checked him twice to assess his symptoms and gave him Tylenol every six hours for the pain, the family said.

Lianos said she lost her temper and yelled at the nurse that if she had known they would be waiting that long, they would have gone back to Kingston for treatment.

The nurse told her to take him there, she said, and that’s exactly what she did. After a three-hour drive back to Kingston, the family learned that Christos’ appendix had burst.

He ended up staying in the hospital for about 10 days, mostly in intensive care.

“We took the risk and it was the biggest risk we ever took in our lives because it could have potentially burst on the road,” said Niki Lianos. “What would we have done then?”

Now she is speaking out to warn people about the wait times in hospitals in Montreal and how dangerous they can be.

Dr. Judy Morris, president of the Association des médecins d’urgence du Québec, said many clinics are closed and have reduced hours during the summer. That’s why, she explained, many more people go to the emergency room for care and then leave unseen.

“These patients can be ticking time bombs because they go away and may have something serious,” she said.

MUHC says the hospital was busy

Rebecca Burns, spokeswoman for MUHC, said the Glen Site’s emergency department was fully staffed on the evening of June 14 when Christos Lianos sought help.

There were two doctors on duty overnight, from June 14 to the morning of June 15, which is the usual occupation, Burns said in an email.

On June 15, three doctors were on duty during the day, plus a medical coordinator, which is again the usual occupation, she said.

However, the emergency department was at 197 percent capacity on June 14, and more than 30 patients from the previous evening had yet to be seen.

Those patients had a higher priority or had been there longer, she said. The next day, June 15, emergency room occupancy hovered around 200 percent, peaking at 225 percent.

“The situation didn’t improve until the next night,” Burns said. “It is difficult to provide optimal care in such circumstances, even when working at maximum efficiency.”

A patient will get a call from the emergency department if they leave without seeing a doctor first, she said. This is not a call to be seen by a doctor, but a protocol to ensure that the patient can receive care or, if necessary, be transferred to a clinic, she said.

The percentage of patients who left unseen during this specific period was 12.7 percent of all visits.

“We have an average of 130 visits a day. That’s why our nurses return an average of 17 patients a day,” says Burns.

“We call three times if we are not immediately reached, followed by a letter if the nurse thinks the patient should follow up on a result of a blood or radiology test.”