Third World Pregnancy Care

Canada, a first-world country with a first-world economy and first-world medical system. Errors can be made anywhere, one supposes.

There are often enough discrete and discreet little news items respecting surgical patients unfortunate to have discovered through a raging infection post-surgery that a sponge or a piece of surgical equipment was inadvertently left in their interior, necessitating not only another surgical procedure to remove the offending item, but a life-saving pharmaceutical protocol to battle the infection.

There are errors resulting from misdiagnoses, surgical tragedies when the wrong operation takes place. And there are dreadful occurrences where patients check into hospital emergency wards deathly ill only to be informed there's nothing wrong with them that an aspirin and a good night's rest won't cure - only to return the following day close to death. In some instances death does indeed occur, and the hospital and the doctors issue heartfelt mea culpas.

Doctors and nurses are understaffed in Canadian hospitals and assuredly over-worked. We've a growing population of elderly, vulnerable to diseases and frailties that accompany agedness. Hospital beds are taken needlessly by elderly patients who don't really require ongoing hospital care, but rather end-of-life or hospice care.

Surgeries are cancelled, regrettably but necessarily, due to a shortage of beds set aside for surgical recovery. But a fairly routine procedure, with a woman giving birth at a Montreal hospital?

There were complications, 38-year-old Christine Sasseville died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage as a result of high blood pressure. This is a common enough condition in some pregnancies and eminently treatable. But the doctors in attendance did not feel any urgency or emergency. And medical staff overlooked establish protocol for women with this condition.

The Quebec coroner's report specifically made reference to serious gaps in the care given to this pregnant woman. The coroner had reached the conclusion that this woman needn't have died had she received standard medical care available at any good hospital. The Quebec Public Protector fully agreed. Ms. Sasseville died needlessly, directly after the birth of her son.

She wasn't able, in her dire condition, to see her newborn child, to hold him, to enjoy her motherhood. She spent a night of pain and suffering in the hospital before succumbing to death. And her husband, Gondiel Ka, for the third time since his wife's death is once again requesting the Quebec College of Physicians to open an investigation into the affair.

Mr. Ka feels justified in that request, that, given the coroner's and the Public Protector's statement, the two doctors involved directly at Maisonneuve Rosemont Hospital on August 14, 2006 with his wife's care, should be charged with failure to provide medical standards of care. The College has so far twice dismissed the case on technical issues.