Hospital horror stories

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

For Lakeridge Health, a review of the patient experience in its emergency room is a learning experience. For the activists who started social media turmoil and spurred public backlash, the move is nothing but a chance for the hospital to buy themselves some time.

“I think it is a very well written media press release for damage control,” says Oshawa’s Kathryn McKissock, who recently become angered with Lakeridge when calls to help her daughter were unheeded. “I don’t have a lot of faith.”

However, Tom McHugh, Lakeridge Health’s executive vice-president and soon-to-be interim CEO as of April 1, says it is quite the opposite.

“We are demonstrating here that we are learning when people are unhappy with our care,” McHugh says.

Initiated earlier this month, Lakeridge is seeking to hire a panel of three experts to study and review three areas of the hospital’s workings. First, ways to improve the patient experience in the ER; second, searching for better ways to respond to patient issues over social media; and third, to look at better ways of following up with patient issues.

Along with the three experts to be hired by Lakeridge, community members and patient advisors will round out the panel. A report is expected to be prepared  in the next three to four months, which will contain recommended courses of action.

“My hope is that we will learn in various ways from this experience,” McHugh says.

“By bringing that group together, by listening to these expert opinions in these three areas, that we will come out with a sort of action plan by June that would look at how we can improve.”

Hospital horror stories

However, whatever improvements are made, they will do nothing to stop the flow of the horror stories currently being shared on the “What Happened to you at Lakeridge Oshawa” Facebook page.

The page was started by McKissock and Christina Smith of Ajax, both of whom had sick daughters who, they claim, didn’t receive the help they needed at the hospital.

McKissock says that in three seperate visits to the hosptial in February, her daughter had an extremely high fever and had trouble breathing.

“(Her throat) had an opening the size of a Smartie and she started breaking out in hives and swelling up,” McKissock says.

However, Lakeridge sent her home after the first visit with a dose of antibiotics for her six-year-old, saying simply that sometimes “kids get sick.”

McKissock returned two more times with her ailing daughter, begging for more tests. Her calls were ignored, she says. Her daughter got so bad that she couldn’t even walk and was only awake for 10 to 15 minutes a day.

“When I took her out of the hospital, I was literally carrying her,” she says.

It turns out, her daughter had Kawasaki disease, an autoimmune disease caused by infection, and the infection had spread to her brain and muscles, a diagnosis McKissock recieved after a single visit to SickKids Hospital in Toronto.

“She might not be here if I actually listened to them,” McKissock says of the Lakeridge diagnosis.

Following the incident and her daughter’s ensuing recovery, McKissock posted her story on Facebook. It soon went viral.

“I was mad and it kind of just started getting shared like crazy,” she says.

In order to share the influx of stories and messages she received, McKissock started the Facebook page. In a few short days, the page attracted more than 2,000 members and hundreds of horror stories regarding mistreatment and lack of compassion of Lakeridge staff.

“We didn’t expect the response we got,” she says.

McHugh says he hopes the review will help Lakeridge to better deal with issues like these.

“If we are able to develop our skills for listening to patients, responding, making sure they understand the next step in their treatment, and they understand what’s happening in their care. That is something that would improve the patient experience,” he says.

However, McKissock says with Lakeridge hiring the experts themselves, there’s a lack of impartiality, adding she thinks the review is perhaps a role the province should take on.

“In reality, they’re hiring three guys, they’re making it sound all fancy and twisting it into these things and different ways of saying it, which makes it even scarier,” she says.

While she’s hopeful, she doesn’t think much will change from the review.

“I really don’t, until this (story) goes bigger.”