Sam Hart, 33, died in Calvary Hospital emergency department waiting room after being left for two hours
A young man has died on New Year’s day after he was left untreated in an understaffed hospital emergency department waiting room.
Canberra Star
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A Canberra man died of massive internal bleeding after being left to wait at the chronically understaffed Calvary Public Hospital emergency department, a coronial inquest has heard.
Sam Hart, 33, died on New Year’s day last year after am ambulance crew dropped him at the hospital, wrongly concluding he was drunk, the inquest was told.
Mr Hart, an alcoholic, had not been drinking an autopsy concluded, and was delirious and needed to be carried to the ambulance after falling and hitting his head.
ACT ambulance service chief officer Howard Wren told the inquest paramedics did not have breathalysers because using them could create “legal issues”.
“Well, in relation to traffic accidents, we don’t want to get into an area of crossing over police,” he said.
Breathalysers also need “constant recalibration to be accurate”, Mr Wren said.
Mr Hart’s father, John, who was by his son’s side when he died, told the Canberra Star the “main issue is that someone was untreated and died after waiting two hours without any attention”.
“I imagine he could have been saved if he had been given proper attention,” he said.
The inquest began last year and is expected to resume with two days of hearings in April.
On Wednesday at the inquest, a senior nurse at Calvary who oversees staffing, Andrea Moore, said when she first saw Mr Hart he was “very ashen”.
She said patients rarely looked like Mr Hart did “unless they have been involved in significant motor vehicle accidents with associated gross trauma”.
She said her reaction when she saw him was “this is not going to end well”.
Ms Moore, whose job involves keeping tabs on the hospital’s day-to-day staffing levels said “people often have to wait two hours in ED”.
The hospital was so understaffed that night that Mr Hart’s condition was not reassessed while waiting for treatment, the inquest heard.
When Mr Hart died, Ms Moore said every attempt had been made to get more nurses to the hospital to open up more beds.
“You can’t open beds if you don’t have the nurses to look after them,” she said.
She said she didn’t know how many times each year the hospital fell into “bed block”.
“I don’t know, there was bed block this morning.”
The inquest continues.