Shocking Discovery at Royal Victoria Hospital: Dead Patient Forgotten in Decontamination Room

Housekeeping staff at the Royal Victoria Hospital were shocked to discover that a dead patient had been zipped up in a body bag and forgotten in a locked decontamination room for at least 12 hours in the overcrowded emergency department before anyone noticed.

The incident, which took place two and a half weeks ago, underscores the enormous pressures the Royal Vic ER faces daily. Normally, when a patient dies, a transport attendant wheels the body to the morgue on D4 at the Glen site in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

But in this case, after the day shift ended at 3 p.m., no one in the busy ER alerted a transport attendant to remove the body, a source told The Gazette. The body was left in the decontamination room until 1:30 a.m., when the housekeeping staff found it during routine cleaning.

“Nobody communicated to the transport department, ‘By the way, we have a body here. Can you pick it up?’” said the veteran MUHC employee, who agreed to be interviewed on condition that their name not be published so they could speak candidly about the issue. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“The No. 1 problem is the lack of communication. No. 2 is that the staff say, ‘It’s not my job, it’s not my job, it’s not my job.’ Everyone is passing the buck.”

Making matters worse is the steady reduction in staff even as ER overcrowding has become a major problem. In the years before the old Royal Vic on University St. moved to the Glen site, there were four overnight transport attendants on staff. But when the Royal Vic moved to the Glen superhospital in 2015, that number was reduced to one.

Annie-Claire Fournier, a spokesperson for the MUHC, declined to comment on the incident, but she did acknowledge that dead bodies are sometimes set aside temporarily in the emergency department.

“We can’t comment on any particular case, but it’s possible that a corpse may be placed in a closed and locked room while waiting to be transported to the morgue,” Fournier explained. “Space issues in the emergency department may force us to make room for sick patients. This procedure is carried out with respect and dignity.

(Although the Royal Vic incident is rare, there have been even more shocking cases involving dead bodies in the annals of Montreal medicine. In 2009, a stillborn infant at Lakeshore General Hospital (not part of the MUHC) was later found in an industrial laundry in the east end. The Lakeshore apologized at the time and pledged to tighten measures following that incident.)

Meanwhile, ER overcrowding and boarding, the practice of keeping patients on stretchers in corridors, sometimes for days, remains a problem at the Royal Vic. On Wednesday afternoon, the ER was filled to 191 per cent capacity, with the average length of stay on a stretcher clocking in at 36 hours and 43 minutes, by far the highest in the province.

In contrast, the occupancy rate at the Jewish General Hospital soared to 253 per cent, but the average stay on stretchers was 17 hours and 52 minutes, suggesting the ER staff at the Jewish General manage to move patients more quickly to hospital wards than at the Royal Vic.

This incident sheds light on the challenges faced by healthcare workers in an already strained system, and raises questions about the communication and staffing issues within the hospital.