Thirty-four hours in a waiting room

On September 19, 2008, Brian Sinclair, a 45-year-old Indigenous man, came to the emergency department of Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre. He used a wheelchair, and a doctor at a clinic had sent him there for a problem with his urinary catheter. He was never registered or assessed at triage. Thirty-four hours later, he was found dead in the waiting room. He died of a bladder infection that could have been treated.

During those hours, staff members assumed he was intoxicated or homeless. Yet the inquest report, delivered on December 12, 2014, by Judge Tim Preston, notes that there is no evidence he had been drinking, and that he had a home. His death, it concluded, was preventable. The judge made 63 recommendations to better monitor people who are waiting.

Manitoba's health minister apologized. And Brian Sinclair's name has become a reminder for the entire Canadian health care system: in a waiting room, no one should become invisible. Every time a caregiver walks around the chairs to look at each face, something of that lesson is kept alive.