A Pierrefonds woman is demanding Urgences Sante explain why it took nearly three hours for an ambulance to collect her husband and to arrive at the hospital.
“I was in panic mode not knowing if my husband was dead, alive…and these guys couldn't be contacted apparently,” Linda Jones Dion told CTV News.
Her husband, Claude Dion, who lives at a residence in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue suffers from dementia and prostate cancer. When he started bleeding from his bowels on Saturday, 9-1-1 logs show that staff at the residence called for help at 5:07 p.m.
The residence’s director confirmed the ambulance arrived in under an hour, but Linda Dion, who drove herself to the hospital, says there was still no sign of her husband by 7:05 p.m. Claude Dion’s ambulance arrived at 7:45 p.m.
Dion now wants to know why there was no communication during the hours she was waiting and worrying about her husband, asking why “that girl on the other end of the 9-1-1 couldn't have radioed to tell me what they were doing and put me at ease.”
Explaining she was mentally distraught and frantic waiting for word on her husband’s whereabouts, Dion has filed an official complaint with Urgences Sante.
Urgences Sante says there are ways of tracking an ambulance’s route, but it can take up to 20 days for them to respond to a complaint. The ambulance service says it will not make any comment about the complaint until it’s addressed by the ombudsman.
Dion is concerned her husband’s mental health could have been affected by the long wait. He remains in hospital, while Linda Dion waits for answers.
