Stanton ordeal continues for mother
Margaret Leishman renews call for public inquiry into hospital security
Walter Strong
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, February 4, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
While Stanton Territorial Hospital management continues to debate how to make the hospital a safer place, a Kakisa mother and her son continue to endure the consequences of what the GNWT has admitted is a gap in the building's security policies and protocols.
Margaret Leishman and her son Allisdair Leishman in Allisdair's room at Stanton Territorial Hospital Jan. 25. Margaret, who has been fighting for better care for his son for almost six years, says the fight is wearing her out. - Walter Strong/NNSL photo |
On Nov. 4, 2009 Allisdair Leishman, then 35-years old, was taken by ambulance to the emergency ward in visible distress. Not long after arriving he wandered to the hospital kitchen, where he injured himself with a knife.
"At that moment ... his life and that of his family changed forever," Allisdair's mother, Margaret Leishman, wrote in a Dec. 17 open letter to MLAs and local media.
His self-inflicted injuries resulted in brain damage and he continues to live in the hospital's long-term care ward, unable to speak and severely physically disabled.
In light of recently-publicized violent outbursts at Stanton, where Yellowknifer reported patients had punched, scratched and choked nurses, Leishman is renewing her call make public the findings of an inquiry into her son's actions and for MLAs to demand a new public inquiry into the gap in hospital protocols, which she says have not changed.
"One of the things I want to stress is that anybody who is brought here by an ambulance ... is a responsibility of the hospital," Leishman told Yellowknifer from her son's hospital room Jan. 25.
"An ambulance brought him here. I thought he would be safe here. What happened to my son? When he walked in here he was intact. All they needed to do was care for him and protect him until he got (his) assessment done."
The findings and recommendations resulting from the 2011 inquiry were bound together in a document titled the Independent Leishman Review. While the findings are confidential, the recommendations were made public. One of these recommendations was that the hospital hire specially-trained guards to deal with patients in danger of injuring themselves or others.
This never happened.
At the time, MLAs - including Glen Abernethy, who is now health minister - supported this recommendation, but by July 2012 the possibility was off the table.
Instead, the the department - in what a department spokesperson described at the time as consultations with the Department of Justice -created a "renewed protocol" with the RCMP to respond to patient issues at the hospital.
To date nobody has explained why the department abandoned this recommendation, although Range Lake MLA Daryl Dolynny alluded to fiscal reasons in a 2012 interview with Yellowknifer.
During her interview with Yellowknifer, Leishman wondered aloud if these fiscal reasons are the same ones that prevent her son from getting the treatment she says he needs.
Shortly after his injury, Allisdair spent four months in the Centennial Centre for Mental Health and Brain Injury in Ponoka, Alta.
He now lives at Stanton, where his mother says his mobility, health and mental state have deteriorated due to a lack of intensive physiotherapy.
To illustrate her point, Margaret pointed to a mostly blank calendar that hangs on the wall of Allisdair's hospital room.
Two days per week, indicating what Margaret says is his weekly bath and a 20-minute physiotherapy session, are marked.
In Ponoka, she says, he was out of bed and exercising every day.
"He could follow the current events of the day," Margaret said. "He watched (the CBC's) Peter Mansbridge (on television). Here, there nothing to stimulate his mind."
So Leishman, 71, is entering into the fifth year of imploring leaders to improve her son's circumstances and travelling twice per month to Stanton from Hay River, at her own expense.
"From the beginning my family has wanted to know what happened," she said. "We haven't gotten any answers yet. We want to see the internal report, and the public inquiry we requested, just to put our minds at ease.
"I'm really tired. I'm getting really tired of fighting. Every day, so much energy is coming out of me to fight for my son."
Leishman says the recent spate of violent outbursts at Stanton only underline the necessity to deal with the hospital's security issues.
"There's so many things that could have been prevented," Margaret said.
"The only way you're going to make changes so that it never happens again is to put something in place downstairs (in the emergency ward)."
In an e-mail to Yellowknifer, health department spokesperson Damien Healy said the department was not at liberty to discuss the case of an individual patient and the department is not considering a new inquiry into security policies and procedures at Stanton.
