An ambulance drives past Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg on June 15, 2023.david lipnowski/The Canadian Press
Manitoba’s deputy minister of health questioned the provincial health authority on the timing and manner of which it informed his office of a patient’s death at a Winnipeg emergency department, documents obtained by The Globe and Mail show.
Scott Sinclair, second to Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, said in internal e-mails that he learned of the death of 49-year-old Chad Christopher Giffin hours after it occurred and had been reported in the media. Mr. Giffin, who was triaged as not urgent and waited eight hours for care, died on Jan. 7 at the Health Sciences Centre, Manitoba’s largest hospital.
The 51-page document obtained through an access to information request, part of which is redacted, consists of e-mails between Mr. Sinclair, other government health staff and officials at Shared Health Manitoba. The e-mails show government officials scrambled to find out details about the incident as media requests piled up.
Mr. Giffin was declared dead in a resuscitation room just before 8 a.m. after staff noticed his condition had worsened. Roughly five hours later, Mr. Sinclair received a briefing note, which was redacted, from Shared Health spokesperson Kevin Engstrom regarding the death.
“Why are we just being advised of this now and in this manner?” Mr. Sinclair replied.
In a separate e-mail to associate deputy minister of health Suzanne Gervais, Mr. Sinclair asked how the media knew about the incident before the two of them. He told Ms. Gervais that he would usually be informed of a situation like this from Lanette Siragusa, then-chief executive of Shared Health.
“I got nothing from SH,” Ms. Gervais said, referring to the provincial health authority.
Mr. Sinclair asked the emergency response team on Jan. 8 to provide him with the paramedics’ report on Mr. Giffin, hoping to “understand the reason for being called and brought to the ED by ambulance.” That same day, Mr. Engstrom, with Shared Health, said there were “still outstanding questions by government to be answered.”
In January, Manitoba launched a critical incident review into Mr. Giffin’s death. But nearly four months without an official update, Manitobans are still left with unanswered questions on how Mr. Giffin died and why he didn’t receive appropriate care. Internal e-mails in Mr. Giffin’s case also raise further concerns about notification protocols.
Emily Coutts, a spokesperson for Mx. Asagwara, said in a statement late Wednesday: “In this case, the process to inform both Mr. Giffin’s family and the Minister’s office about his death moved too slowly.”
Mr. Giffin’s family was not legally responsible for his care. Media outlets had started reaching out to the family, however, before Shared Health notified them Jan. 10.
“One of the most important changes we made in light of Mr. Giffin’s death was to amend protocol when it comes to notifying next of kin in the case of patients who are under the purview of the Public Guardian Trustee so that family are notified first no matter what,” Ms. Coutts said.
Less than a month after the incident, Ms. Siragusa was replaced by Chris Christodoulou as Shared Health’s new CEO. The province has previously said the February hiring was unrelated to the January incident.
But Ms. Coutts, on Wednesday, said changes to Shared Health’s leadership and within its non-clinical administration were made by the health authority’s board “in part out of a desire for more accountability, more transparency and better communication.”
Several officials at Shared Health – who were part of the internal e-mail communications in the first few days after Mr. Giffin’s death – no longer work there, confirmed the health authority, without providing names of which of them have left.
Shared Health did not respond to a list of questions regarding communications related to the death of Mr. Giffin.
Premier Wab Kinew, who was elected in 2023 in large part because of his promise to reform health care in Manitoba, has said the system failed Mr. Giffin. He had said the province is committed to ensuring a situation like Mr. Giffin’s does not repeat itself.
Ms. Coutts listed 17 measures that have been put in place since the death, in response to recommendations that have not been publicly released by the critical reporting incident committee.
Among the measures are: training for 15 health care aides to perform checks on patients in the emergency department, with one position dedicated to this task 24/7; reviewing 10 patient records weekly to ensure safety protocols are being followed; and reviews of staffing models in the waiting room with contingency plans.
Patients dying while waiting for care are relatively rare occurrences in Canada but not unheard of. There have been multiple deaths in Manitoba emergency departments in recent years, including at St. Boniface Hospital in January, 2024; Grace Hospital in November, 2023; and the Health Sciences Centre in February, 2023.
