Seeking solutions: Nova Scotia woman's ER death prompts health-care debate

The death of a mother at a Nova Scotia hospital following an hours-long wait in the emergency room is sparking debate about what changes need to be made to prevent a future tragedy.

Some ideas are already being suggested, but front-line workers say the problem goes much deeper.

Ten days after 37-year-old Allison Holthoff died in a Nova Scotia emergency room, her husband Günter Holthoff still doesn't know his wife's official cause of death.

It's one of the questions that continue to haunt him, and one of the reasons he shared their story with the rest of Canada Monday.

Allison complained she wasn't feeling well on New Year's Eve, with ever-increasing pain in her abdomen.

Günter wound up taking her to the Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre, where her condition worsened.

Seven hours later, the mother of three and deputy fire chief was dead.

They buried her on Saturday.

"I told him last night that he's a hero," said Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin, the independent MLA for Cumberland North, who's been advocating for the family.

While hosting a news conference with them Monday, Smith-McCrossin also released a letter outlining a seven-point plan to address the situation.

The first idea came from New Brunswick.

That province launched a pilot project last summer adding an extra health-care worker in emergency rooms to monitor and serve patients through the triage process.

"So, if someone's medical condition was to deteriorate, it would be assessed right away and that person could be taken in immediately," said Smith-McCrossin.

"That's not even a Band-Aid. That's a piece of tissue," said Charlottetown ER Physician Dr. Trevor Jain, who Tweeted his views Tuesday, insisting the problems in emergency rooms always come back to bottlenecks and shortcomings elsewhere in the system.

Both NB and NS have lost patients in the ED directly related to ED overcrowding. ED overcrowding is caused by access block. Access block is caused by admitted patients boarded in the ED that can’t get a bed in the hospital. Heartbreaking for family. https://t.co/izPUPyiirw

— Trevor Jain (@TrevorJain) January 10, 2023

"We can have lots of rooms with beds in it. But with no highly qualified nurses, support staff, ward clerks, porters, a whole bunch of different folks, to make that bed work, it's just a piece of furniture in a room," said Jain.

Meanwhile, Nova Scotia Health Minister Michelle Thompson confirms her department did receive Smith-McCrossin's letter, and everything is being considered as a mandatory quality review continues.

"And we will follow the recommendations from that process. So it is important that we hear from community members as well as front-line staff and most certainly the family who were involved," said Thompson.

Günter was said to be touched by kind words and messages coming from across the country, but it's only deepened his resolve to find out what happened -- and make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to support the Holthoff family.