Man dies after 3 -1/2 hour wait in Swift Current emergency room

A patient waited in Swift Current’s emergency room with chest pains three-and-a-half hours before he died there in August.

Forty-five-year-old Michael Line had a history of heart disease. The circumstances of his death are now part of an investigation in the Cypress Hills Health Region.

“We need to know what else was going on in the department. Were there other patients requiring a high level of care than this unfortunate patient?” Dr. Ivo Radevski, senior medical officer for the health region, said.

“We will be able to come up with recommendations to put things in place to prevent this from happening again,” said Radevski.

Radevski admitted that a cardiac patient — if medical staff knew his medical history — would have been  a top priority. He said a potential cardiac patient should have been seen in minutes under normal circumstances.

He said the hope is the investigation will find what went wrong so it will never happen again.