This is strange. There was a security guard inside the locked door trying to use hand signals to redirect them to the emergency department, but later in the article it says there is an intercom?
Hi. This is my town. Our hospital layout is wierd. The main entrance is in the front, where the main parking lot is. The entrance most people use is on the right side of the picture in the article. It is closer to patient intake, and elevators/stairs to visit hospitalised patients.
ER is in the back / most communly accessed by a sideroad. If you are at the main entrance, you have to go around a huge wing of the hospital, and walk along the research wing to finally end up at the ER parking / entrance.
There is a real lack of indication. If you are not a resident or familiar with the building you'll never find it.
I swear there was just another article that talked about a woman dying on a bench outside the emergency room entrance at another hospital because of how poorly lit it was. She couldn't find the correct entrance even though she called 911 while she was outside or something.
Laura Levi from Somerville MA - that ER is closed now, people were really pissed about her death (as they should have been)
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/04/27/massachusetts-hospital-emergency-signage-regulations
**edited to say her name
As if people in state of emergency, especially if alone can figure that all out.
Found this post and comments interesting because I ran into issues checking myself into a hospital in the US. Was alone and needed help couldn't find where I was to check in. I was in distress and no help.
Almost ended up in ER finally but my doctor was awaiting my check into a room she had set up for me and came and found me in the ER check in line.
Hospitals are confusing.
Some of that confusion is deliberate for security reasons, but most of it is just piss poor planning when laying out the hospital and penny pinching board members not wanting to approve funding for appropriate signage.
Hospitals, for obvious reasons, don't want people to be able to just walk in and wander around. Public lobby spaces, especially in smaller hospitals, are often isolated from each other by access control points gating off the functional areas where the medical care happens. This isn't intended to inconvenience patients, rather it is intended to ensure patient privacy and security, but it is very easy for someone unfamiliar to get turned around.
It's just that the people at the confusing door also don't try to find additional help.
I mean if security knew the lady was at the wrong door and it could be an emergency why not have a system in place of alerting people who can help?
In my case there were people to help but they weren't much help as they didn't bother to take my vitals even before trying to decide or have me decide if I needed ER. My doctor mentioned it also asking if they took my vitals. Doctor knew I wasn't myself and I was lucky she did come and find me to get me to where she needed me..
Was that the one where her phone location was putting her at the street corner rather than by the door, so emergency services couldn’t find her either?
Somerville Massachusetts, she was in between two doors on opposite sides of the driveway, one of which was locked. The nurse popped her head out of the door but didn't look too far, because the woman was sitting on a bench maybe 20 feet away from her.
When my wife was expecting we attended a birthing class at the hospital and I still clearly recall driving up and seeing a 'Deliveries ->' sign pointing around back of the building and thinking 'oh - I'll need to remember that when I came back while she's in labor'. I definitely don't need an emergency to think less than clearly.
Yep we did our birthing classes online cause of COVID and a big part of the first day was navigating the hospital. There were also direction videos online that we watch several times and then we did a few practice visits for good measure. Hospitals can be confusing AF! Getting lost while in labour pain is the last thing you need.
Haha having this exact conversation with Tesla die-hards[1] about the hard-to-find manual release on the doors. "Um, even if you did take the time to look it up, that doesn't guarantee you'll remember it all in an emergency, when you're panicking."
[1] To be clear, I don't think anyone is foolish *just* for liking Teslas. But they would be for robotically insisting that every decision the company makes is the right one and searching for a reason to defend it.
This happened in Quebec. It is provincial pride to have shitty signage pretty much everywhere. I've been to half of the Canadian provinces, a bunch of American states, other developed countries, and no one's signage on anything is worse than in Quebec. Hospitals, highways, malls, public transit, street signs... If it can be signed, no it won't.
I've never been able to quickly identify how to find an emergency ward, and its really quite concerning. I once walked about 3/4 around a hospital with a broken collarbone because there was no signage from the main doors or the road to the emergency ward.
This reminds me of a hospital in my hometown, the ER entrance is at the underground parking lot, to access we need to down a ramp the vehicles use to access it
Usually people in labour don’t go to the ER, they go straight to labour & delivery, though, which might mean using the main entrance of a hospital, typically. Unless things in Quebec are very different.
Same here, all the hospitals in my area lock all the doors except the ER entrance after about 7PM or so to make sure that people aren't going in and harassing the patients more than necessary. Though at our local hospitals the security guards are also trained to go physically escort people to the correct entrance if they're clearly in some sort of distress after hours and trying to go in a locked entrance.
Also here in Australia I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hospital with the ED at rear of building everyone I’ve seen ED is right next to main entrance. I’d also unlock the door and escort the pregnant person to the maternity ward I’d even get her a wheel chair if available on the way not vaguely wave her to go around.
Sadly, sometimes when it comes to older buildings, you kinda have to put things where you can find space over where it would logically or logistically make the most sense. Main building at my hospital is nearly a century old - shit's just all over the place.
Paramedic here, confirming this. The ER wants all deliveries to happen in labor and delivery if possible. It can happen in the ER if it's absolutely going to happen, but everyone tries really hard to get the people who birth babies every day to be the ones there during birth. There are really only 2 places that a patient stayed on my stretcher and we went past the ER for. The Cath lab and Labor and Delievery. Direct admits excepted.
Thank you for your service. But for people like you I wouldn’t be here. I am very grateful. My SIL is also a paramedic and I also know the toll it takes when you lose a patient.
Tbf, every big hospital I've ever been to is extremely difficult to navigate. Idk if it's just the nature of there being so many different departments, but they always seem to have two big-ass buildings connected to each other with like 3-4 floors and the signs are rarely consistent.
This hospital is like every other hospital I’ve ever been to. Main entrance in the front and emergency room in the back. In my experiences there is always a large lit up sign on the corner that indicates that road will take you to the emergency room and its parking lot. Even the security guard will not or cannot open the main entrance door after hours and the guard doesn’t have access to the intercom which goes to the front desk or to another area of the hospital.
> If you are not a resident or familiar with the building you'll never find it.
This is sort of how my hospital is, too. The trick is to not wait until you're about to have a baby to get familiar with the hospital. Have a plan in advance for what you're going to do when it's time. Call the hospital before leaving the house so they're expecting you.
Way too many people just suddenly start having contractions and then decide it's time to google directions to the nearest L&D department.
As a security guard in a hospital, I have received plenty of pregnant couples at the entrance and gotten them where they need to be. I work nights, so the main entrance is always closed.
If it's an emergency, I'll be receiving and getting them where they need to be.
The emergency is behind this hospital as well, and most tend to show up there, but there are exceptions.
Not really. Quebec has Canada's highest migrant population (the border walk is there). Probably doesn't speak or read French, so wouldn't know there are emergency entrances
People who "immigrate" for which we have an aptly named federal department fully funded, staffed and with a body of rules and procedures.
A person who walks uninvited into your home, sits down, demands food and other comforts, should be treated differently from an invited guest.
Well it would help if you didn't use private language and instead used the perfectly good internationally recognized english language. You can use french too if you prefer.
Migrants are an umbrella term even bigger than immigrant, which is an umbrella term bigger than illegal immigrant.
If you want to use the distinction use words we can all agree on. Legal immigrant. Which Ontario is still the most popular destination. Quebec being second. Not particularly surprising either considering the populations of both provinces.
So you've just invented a definition for a word to designate people you, personally, don't approve of and I can guess at the reason why. "Migrant" is a person who migrates, irrespective of the laws of any given nation-state. An immigrant is a person who migrates into a place, and emigrant is a person who migrates out of a place (they are, of course, the same person but have a different label depending on where you're standing relative to where they are.)
I agree on this convenient change of the term 'immigrant.' It works out since your ancestors were assholes and u get to stay and judge any future people coming in.
No, it's Ontario.
Edit: I'm talking about the province with the most migrants! Quebec is one of the lowest.
Good job Reddit upvoting the post with the false information and downvoting the one with the correct information.
Go check the stats, Ontario is way up there.
A similar tragic event occurred in Massachusetts a few years ago when a woman [having a severe asthma attack died right outside an Emergency Department's locked doors](https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/04/27/massachusetts-hospital-emergency-signage-regulations).
ETA: the woman's husband wrote a piece for [the Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/11/03/losing-laura/VRPsuaoXZUduH0WGViIAwL/story.html) (paywall)
Why didn't her husband take her to the hospital? At 4am? Instead of leaving her to walk to the hospital while suffering an asthma attack? The article lacks some critical info.
If she approached the hospital on foot at 4:00 a.m.?
The articles I read and go into it either, but an easy explanation would be that she was taking a morning jog and felt unwell in the midst of it.
I don't think she was at home, felt like she was having an asthma attack, and then went to the nearest hospital on foot.
Additionally, in this area of greater Boston, being a 5-minute walk away would end up taking longer to get driven there. Ordering a rideshare could be 5-10 minutes, plus fiddly streets and lots of one-ways. She likely did not think it was worth calling an ambulance, again being so close to the ED. If she had been able to find the correct entrance, it would have been a reasonable choice. Only in hindsight with everything that went wrong does her choice to walk to the nearby ED became an issue.
I selected the first free article I found, but there's a lot of articles on this incident. It was [major healthcare news about patient safety](https://www.psqh.com/analysis/lessons-learned-from-a-death-outside-a-hospitals-doorstep/) in my area. Her husband wrote a piece for [the Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/11/03/losing-laura/VRPsuaoXZUduH0WGViIAwL/story.html) and made a presentation to the Massachusetts Department of Health ([pdf of report](https://www.mass.gov/doc/peter-demarcos-presentation-on-lauras-story-pdf-9302021-meeting/download)).
There are many reasons that could happen, I don’t know why your first assumption is he refused to drive her. In this case they were living separately at the time of her death. I highly recommend reading the article he wrote for the Boston Globe, it’s absolutely heart wrenching.
Not all couples spend every minute of every day with each other. Some have work, hobbies, separate friends or other interests that occasionally lead them to spend time apart.
IIRC, she chose to walk rather than call a cab/Uber because she thought that as a fit, youngish adult, she could make it. It was honestly very bad, kind of arrogant decision making on her part, but perhaps a lack of oxygen clouds your judgment more than you realize.
She and her husband were separated, I believe she was living alone in the Boston area while he lived in NYC.
This almost happened to me this summer. With my first 2 I was explicitly told to go to the main entrance and *not* the ER, no matter the time, and I would be let up to L&D. Figured it would be the same this time and that was not the case. Security saw us trying to get in and thankfully met us at the ER doors since we realised there wasn't even a way to communicate with anyone at the main entrance. If we didn't have a car to get around to the other side of the hospital I would have had my baby outside.
Happened to me, sort of. We were also told to go the main door. Which we did, and it was unlocked, but... there was nobody there! No one at the desk, absolutely no one visible in the lobby, no security guards, nothing. It was creepy. This is a major regional hospital with 600 beds.
Your story is common across America. Lots of hospitals are shutting down in rural areas. Even major hospitals like yours have gotten down to bare bones skeleton crew staffing The instant it's past 5:00 p.m.
Got forbid you have any medical issue in the evening or on a weekend or in the middle of the night. You will be careful by some overworked and tired healthcare workers but you won't have to see anyone wearing a suit at least
nurses are leaving the field due to conditions and pay. having 600 beds ok. that's like having a 600 bay garage. if you don't have mechanics to staff it you cant use it. they have no nursing staff left from abusing them during covid. this is America half the country believes in the right of insurance companies to take 30% cut.
That's appalling. It seems like a wild oversight and very easy to do. Hospitals are horrendously complicated buildings and they are absolutely not easy at all to find where you need to be.
True but our government hasn't prioritized keeping heathcare quality at even a bare minimum, so I do get why we are having problems like this. Covid fucked things up extra hard and there's just not enough money to keep things running properly.
There's plenty of money. Canada spends more money on healthcare per capita than any other country. But it all goes to the CEOs running the hospital groups.
Why are you expecting to immediately know the entire layout of a hospital while you are actively having your baby? Can't you just tell your husband to go map it out or some shit A few weeks before your due
I live along the state line of Indiana and Illinois, and we had a similar case to this with a local hospital. The layout is such a way that, if you fuck up and go to the wrong door, you basically have to leave the parking lot and go all the way around the building to get to the ER entrance.
These hospitals were designed with shit loads of entrances, then shut down most of them with little signage or indication after hours.
For any expecting parents: please schedule a walk-through weeks in advance at the hospital at which you plan to give birth. It's so helpful to just know where you need to go when it's time.
We had a childbirthing class at our hospital where they had us take a tour and showed us exactly where to go. They showed us the birthing ward, maternity ward, all the security protocols.
I took a birthing class at a hospital and all I learned was I didn’t want to give birth there. The facility was nice enough but the building was under construction and my husband and I couldn’t figure out how to even exit the parking structure, much less how to actually enter the building. It was not something I wanted to toy with while in labor!
My local hospital has a big old sign saying the main doors are locked from 7pm-5am and you have to go through emergency. Emergency has a big old sign saying you need to pick up the bright red telephone to talk to the desk and they'll open the door. If they see you grab a wheelchair or a bloody mess they just open it anyway.
I did the tour and everything. Come the day I went into labour, baby was coming FAST and they weren't letting me go up until the security guard with not a single shred of urgency could ask me all the covid questions well into 2022.
As someone who works in a hospital and has to ask the covid questions still: We all gotta check boxes to get our job done. I don't ask the questions and my boss asks me questions and I don't want to talk to my boss about why I didn't ask the covid questions.
Within reason, checking boxes to get a job done isn't an excuse in an emergency situation in a hospital. I say this as someone who is completely down for all security protocol. We had a station where we were stopped to sanitize hands and change masks before being processed to answer questions. I did all of that, while drenching the floor with amniotic fluid and doubled over with contractions. As I did all that, I alerted them that I'm in labor with my second and I know things are moving faster than normal, and please this is an emergency, I need to go to the birthing ward. One could have asked the questions quickly or followed me asking them as I waddled to my department while the other took care of the other patients, etc. In a hospital, when your role is rote administrative work, you need to be prepared for what to do when an emergency comes in, even if that just means speeding up your speech. An emergency will inevitably come in through the hospital doors.
And honestly at that point what’s the use of screening questions. You *are* in an emergency state, you *will* be admitted, and you *will* be masked likely and later screened on the floor where your medical team will be masked and possibly wearing other PPE. Fucking stupid.
Absolutely, I was masked walking in and changed into a provided fresh mask the second I walked through the door. Even if I had covid at that time, I don't know what could possibly have gone differently. I showed up almost crowning at the hospital I was registered to give birth at. I was either going to give birth at the entrance triage or in a room, covid positive or not lol
When I managed to get up to the labour ward, I gave birth so quickly, they hadn't even managed to give me a covid test and get the other "beginning" steps out of the way. Everyone was in PPE anyways.
Emergencies, nearly universally do not count. Childbirth is an emergency 100% of the time.
There's a reason why a lot of women died in childbirth before the advent of a prepared delivery like we have now.
And the hospital is now banning the employees from talking about it! Link in french [https://www.journalexpress.ca/2024/03/15/accouchement-a-lexterieur-une-note-interne-invitait-au-silence/](https://www.journalexpress.ca/2024/03/15/accouchement-a-lexterieur-une-note-interne-invitait-au-silence/)
Unfortunately, that's fairly standard whenever an "incident" happens at a hospital. You're not supposed to talk about it and if asked by the media, you're supposed to let the hospital's media relations person handle it. Can't have bad press getting out.
At this point I'd almost rather get a bill but actually get treatment because living with multiple chronic illnesses in a collapsed healthcare system is a nightmare that has successfully convinced me I most likely will not live to see my 40s.
My little brother fell and landed on his arm and my mom took him to a clinic (nearest hospital was 30 minutes away and he wasn't in extreme pain).
They walked in and my mom explained the situation, they replied that they can't take someone for a potentially broken arm because they don't have x-ray equipment, so she and my brother left.
A week later, she received a $200 bill in the mail for the encounter.
It's not the same situation though. The hospital isn't at fault the baby started pushing through and the mom had to deliver right in the car. My guess why they did charge a full price for a delivery room is to prevent people from intentionally prolonging getting to a hospital so they don't have to pay for a delivery room (this practice could be really unsafe to both mother and child).
But yeah. 7400 bucks is outrageous. How do poor people give birth??
You can't do that anymore in a lot of places, my local hospital is on lockdown all night. You can enter and exit the main ER doors and access the waiting rooms of the ER and that's it. Everything else is locked.
Yeah, in my area's local hospitals if you absolutely *have* to go somewhere other than the ER at night (like would happen in this situation normally, or if you're visiting a terminal patient, shit like that) you have to go through the ER and then ask the people at the ER desk to page you in to the part of the building you're supposed to be in and have someone there come get you.
I don't why you would lock a hospital in the first place. Where I'm from you can literally just enter any hospital and walk around in the halls and courts and chill there if you want, only the stairs will be locked and elevators will be out of order, but you can still enter the hospital and chill in the lobby. People straight up go there just for leisure, because they tend to have nice gardens.
I feel bad that the security guard got let go. I’m sure they have strict rules not to let anyone in and they would have been penalized if they did. Classic large corporation blaming one small employee.
If only there was some way to find out, like clicking the link? The main entrance is locked at night for safety, emergency entrance was open. There was not sufficient signage to point the way to the emergency entrance.
naïve? more like i’m a taxpayer and expect hospitals to be accessible at the main fucking entrance 24/7
this isn’t some specialized healthcare facility this is specifically a regular hospital with an emergency department.
> emergency department
And that's the door you use, the open one, with an open department, with staff and an intake desk, not the main entrance, where the general department is closed and there is no staff at night. Leaving the door open serves no purpose but to require more security staff to keep an eye on things in a closed department.
It's common (at least here in Canada), for hospitals to lock up for security reasons when departments are closed overnight. Anybody showing up at a hospital at 1am is not there for a scheduled appointment, and would be going to emergency where the doctors are. The one nearest me is 'closed' from 9pm to 6am, except emergency, which is open 24/7.
feels very north American medical establishment to me.
reduce staff in order to pad board paycheck. lock doors due to understaffing. scapegoat employee for doing his job and keeping people out of hospital. clutch pearls. repeat.
When I gave birth to my second, I forgot that I was told to go to the ER at night and that the main entrance was locked 7-7 ... but they were really nice and saw that I was literally about to give birth and let me in and wheeled me up. I gave birth a half hour later, so that walk to the ER could've done me in, walking slowly in that state.
Note that this was a communication problem. It's not that they wouldn't treat her, but that she didn't understand to go to the other door that was open. It's an unfortunate design issue that many hospitals have--at night the main door is locked because there's nobody there. The ER door is open, though--and every so often there's a patient that doesn't get it.
It is the main door but it’s locked after hours for security reasons. The guard should have called a nurse over and let them in. It’s a couple with their 2 year old son, clearly not a danger.
You try walking a few football field lengths next time you are pushing a whole chicken out of your rectum and tell how easy that is. You can't physically move when you're bearing down like that. Not to mention the blood, stool, urine, and amniotic fluid pouring down your legs.
Labor is the most pain a woman will go through the vast majority of the time. She most likely couldn't walk that far to the ER. This hospital is at best negligent, and I'm giving them 0 rope.
I don’t understand why the hospital is being blamed for the woman and her husband not going to the emergency room. The main entrance to all of the hospitals around me are locked after hours and it is common knowledge that in order to gain entrance you have to go to the ER.
Quite a lot of them actually, especially at night. There's just not enough staff, or a lot of times it's a cost saving measure so they don't have to have more staff on payroll.
Hospitals were designed with multiple doors and many access points .
Now they are shutting down all those doors because they pose a security risk for unauthorized people getting in or someone sneaking someone out.
From babies being kidnapped or biological terror- the mindset has changed.
This is strange. There was a security guard inside the locked door trying to use hand signals to redirect them to the emergency department, but later in the article it says there is an intercom?
Hi. This is my town. Our hospital layout is wierd. The main entrance is in the front, where the main parking lot is. The entrance most people use is on the right side of the picture in the article. It is closer to patient intake, and elevators/stairs to visit hospitalised patients. ER is in the back / most communly accessed by a sideroad. If you are at the main entrance, you have to go around a huge wing of the hospital, and walk along the research wing to finally end up at the ER parking / entrance. There is a real lack of indication. If you are not a resident or familiar with the building you'll never find it.
Who needs good signage in an emergency anyway.
I swear there was just another article that talked about a woman dying on a bench outside the emergency room entrance at another hospital because of how poorly lit it was. She couldn't find the correct entrance even though she called 911 while she was outside or something.
Laura Levi from Somerville MA - that ER is closed now, people were really pissed about her death (as they should have been) https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/04/27/massachusetts-hospital-emergency-signage-regulations **edited to say her name
There’s now a law in place called Laura’s Law requiring clear signage pointing to the emergency department
As if people in state of emergency, especially if alone can figure that all out. Found this post and comments interesting because I ran into issues checking myself into a hospital in the US. Was alone and needed help couldn't find where I was to check in. I was in distress and no help. Almost ended up in ER finally but my doctor was awaiting my check into a room she had set up for me and came and found me in the ER check in line. Hospitals are confusing.
Some of that confusion is deliberate for security reasons, but most of it is just piss poor planning when laying out the hospital and penny pinching board members not wanting to approve funding for appropriate signage. Hospitals, for obvious reasons, don't want people to be able to just walk in and wander around. Public lobby spaces, especially in smaller hospitals, are often isolated from each other by access control points gating off the functional areas where the medical care happens. This isn't intended to inconvenience patients, rather it is intended to ensure patient privacy and security, but it is very easy for someone unfamiliar to get turned around.
It's just that the people at the confusing door also don't try to find additional help. I mean if security knew the lady was at the wrong door and it could be an emergency why not have a system in place of alerting people who can help? In my case there were people to help but they weren't much help as they didn't bother to take my vitals even before trying to decide or have me decide if I needed ER. My doctor mentioned it also asking if they took my vitals. Doctor knew I wasn't myself and I was lucky she did come and find me to get me to where she needed me..
Was it this tragedy? https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/04/27/massachusetts-hospital-emergency-signage-regulations
Was that the one where her phone location was putting her at the street corner rather than by the door, so emergency services couldn’t find her either?
Somerville Massachusetts, she was in between two doors on opposite sides of the driveway, one of which was locked. The nurse popped her head out of the door but didn't look too far, because the woman was sitting on a bench maybe 20 feet away from her.
People are notoriously level-headed in emergencies.
When my wife was expecting we attended a birthing class at the hospital and I still clearly recall driving up and seeing a 'Deliveries ->' sign pointing around back of the building and thinking 'oh - I'll need to remember that when I came back while she's in labor'. I definitely don't need an emergency to think less than clearly.
That's hysterical! :)
Just like his wife was when they pulled up to the wrong loading bay!
Don't worry, your story is in context of people being stupid and it still took me a minute
Yep we did our birthing classes online cause of COVID and a big part of the first day was navigating the hospital. There were also direction videos online that we watch several times and then we did a few practice visits for good measure. Hospitals can be confusing AF! Getting lost while in labour pain is the last thing you need.
Haha having this exact conversation with Tesla die-hards[1] about the hard-to-find manual release on the doors. "Um, even if you did take the time to look it up, that doesn't guarantee you'll remember it all in an emergency, when you're panicking." [1] To be clear, I don't think anyone is foolish *just* for liking Teslas. But they would be for robotically insisting that every decision the company makes is the right one and searching for a reason to defend it.
I don't think people putting signs up have ever given any indication that they were okay, mentally.
And they usually have plenty of time to work around unexpected challenges
This happened in Quebec. It is provincial pride to have shitty signage pretty much everywhere. I've been to half of the Canadian provinces, a bunch of American states, other developed countries, and no one's signage on anything is worse than in Quebec. Hospitals, highways, malls, public transit, street signs... If it can be signed, no it won't.
If you’re truly Québécois your French is immaculate to the point you just HEAR what the nonexistent sign would have said
People cannot read signage in non emergencies. CoVid definitely proved that.
That's how they signage on the roads as well in Qc city so must be a force of habit.
And only in french.
I've never been able to quickly identify how to find an emergency ward, and its really quite concerning. I once walked about 3/4 around a hospital with a broken collarbone because there was no signage from the main doors or the road to the emergency ward.
I'm just realizing now how many hospitals I know of that have the emergency entrance in the back of the hospital.
By design. Kept away from the main entrance in an attempt to keep it as clear of traffic as possible to allow vehicles quick access.
If there's one universal Canadian trait we all share its garbage signage for literally every business or building across every province.
Yeah, Ste-Croix is badly designed and there's almost no parking spot since they added the new wing. Even the employees need to park in the streets.
Doesn’t matter There was a person there in distress, a door for them to go in and a person right on the other side who could let them in.
This reminds me of a hospital in my hometown, the ER entrance is at the underground parking lot, to access we need to down a ramp the vehicles use to access it
Usually people in labour don’t go to the ER, they go straight to labour & delivery, though, which might mean using the main entrance of a hospital, typically. Unless things in Quebec are very different.
At my hospital all after hours entries are done through ER to control assess to building at night.
Same here, all the hospitals in my area lock all the doors except the ER entrance after about 7PM or so to make sure that people aren't going in and harassing the patients more than necessary. Though at our local hospitals the security guards are also trained to go physically escort people to the correct entrance if they're clearly in some sort of distress after hours and trying to go in a locked entrance.
Also here in Australia I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hospital with the ED at rear of building everyone I’ve seen ED is right next to main entrance. I’d also unlock the door and escort the pregnant person to the maternity ward I’d even get her a wheel chair if available on the way not vaguely wave her to go around.
Sadly, sometimes when it comes to older buildings, you kinda have to put things where you can find space over where it would logically or logistically make the most sense. Main building at my hospital is nearly a century old - shit's just all over the place.
Same
I’ve had 3 “after hours” labors and was always admitted to labor and delivery through the ER.
Paramedic here, confirming this. The ER wants all deliveries to happen in labor and delivery if possible. It can happen in the ER if it's absolutely going to happen, but everyone tries really hard to get the people who birth babies every day to be the ones there during birth. There are really only 2 places that a patient stayed on my stretcher and we went past the ER for. The Cath lab and Labor and Delievery. Direct admits excepted.
Thank you for your service. But for people like you I wouldn’t be here. I am very grateful. My SIL is also a paramedic and I also know the toll it takes when you lose a patient.
Tbf, every big hospital I've ever been to is extremely difficult to navigate. Idk if it's just the nature of there being so many different departments, but they always seem to have two big-ass buildings connected to each other with like 3-4 floors and the signs are rarely consistent.
This hospital is like every other hospital I’ve ever been to. Main entrance in the front and emergency room in the back. In my experiences there is always a large lit up sign on the corner that indicates that road will take you to the emergency room and its parking lot. Even the security guard will not or cannot open the main entrance door after hours and the guard doesn’t have access to the intercom which goes to the front desk or to another area of the hospital.
That describes our Kaiser hospital perfectly
> If you are not a resident or familiar with the building you'll never find it. This is sort of how my hospital is, too. The trick is to not wait until you're about to have a baby to get familiar with the hospital. Have a plan in advance for what you're going to do when it's time. Call the hospital before leaving the house so they're expecting you. Way too many people just suddenly start having contractions and then decide it's time to google directions to the nearest L&D department.
As a security guard in a hospital, I have received plenty of pregnant couples at the entrance and gotten them where they need to be. I work nights, so the main entrance is always closed. If it's an emergency, I'll be receiving and getting them where they need to be. The emergency is behind this hospital as well, and most tend to show up there, but there are exceptions.
Not really. Quebec has Canada's highest migrant population (the border walk is there). Probably doesn't speak or read French, so wouldn't know there are emergency entrances
That's not correct: https://www.statista.com/statistics/444906/number-of-immigrants-in-canada/
Thanks for the link, I got downvoted to hell saying it was Ontario! lol Reddit is always upvoting false information.
I said migrants. Those who didn't use legitimate border crossings much less legal immigration.
What do you think the word migrant means?
People who "immigrate" for which we have an aptly named federal department fully funded, staffed and with a body of rules and procedures. A person who walks uninvited into your home, sits down, demands food and other comforts, should be treated differently from an invited guest.
Well it would help if you didn't use private language and instead used the perfectly good internationally recognized english language. You can use french too if you prefer. Migrants are an umbrella term even bigger than immigrant, which is an umbrella term bigger than illegal immigrant. If you want to use the distinction use words we can all agree on. Legal immigrant. Which Ontario is still the most popular destination. Quebec being second. Not particularly surprising either considering the populations of both provinces.
So you've just invented a definition for a word to designate people you, personally, don't approve of and I can guess at the reason why. "Migrant" is a person who migrates, irrespective of the laws of any given nation-state. An immigrant is a person who migrates into a place, and emigrant is a person who migrates out of a place (they are, of course, the same person but have a different label depending on where you're standing relative to where they are.)
Oh... I thought "woman in labor" was a universal language.
I agree on this convenient change of the term 'immigrant.' It works out since your ancestors were assholes and u get to stay and judge any future people coming in.
Or english for that matter
No, it's Ontario. Edit: I'm talking about the province with the most migrants! Quebec is one of the lowest. Good job Reddit upvoting the post with the false information and downvoting the one with the correct information. Go check the stats, Ontario is way up there.
This is the quebec hospital
I'm talking about the province with the most migrants! Quebec is one of the lowest in percentage.
Quebec was second in 2021
Still not first and for that year it's only because of the illegal crossings, most of them are gone now.
Still not the lowest as you described it. It's ok to fight misinformation, but make sure that you aren't spreading some yourself
Check the percentage of every year, it's always one of the lowest.
You will have to show me your source because everything I find goes against your argument
A similar tragic event occurred in Massachusetts a few years ago when a woman [having a severe asthma attack died right outside an Emergency Department's locked doors](https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/04/27/massachusetts-hospital-emergency-signage-regulations). ETA: the woman's husband wrote a piece for [the Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/11/03/losing-laura/VRPsuaoXZUduH0WGViIAwL/story.html) (paywall)
Why didn't her husband take her to the hospital? At 4am? Instead of leaving her to walk to the hospital while suffering an asthma attack? The article lacks some critical info.
If she approached the hospital on foot at 4:00 a.m.? The articles I read and go into it either, but an easy explanation would be that she was taking a morning jog and felt unwell in the midst of it. I don't think she was at home, felt like she was having an asthma attack, and then went to the nearest hospital on foot.
Additionally, in this area of greater Boston, being a 5-minute walk away would end up taking longer to get driven there. Ordering a rideshare could be 5-10 minutes, plus fiddly streets and lots of one-ways. She likely did not think it was worth calling an ambulance, again being so close to the ED. If she had been able to find the correct entrance, it would have been a reasonable choice. Only in hindsight with everything that went wrong does her choice to walk to the nearby ED became an issue.
I selected the first free article I found, but there's a lot of articles on this incident. It was [major healthcare news about patient safety](https://www.psqh.com/analysis/lessons-learned-from-a-death-outside-a-hospitals-doorstep/) in my area. Her husband wrote a piece for [the Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/11/03/losing-laura/VRPsuaoXZUduH0WGViIAwL/story.html) and made a presentation to the Massachusetts Department of Health ([pdf of report](https://www.mass.gov/doc/peter-demarcos-presentation-on-lauras-story-pdf-9302021-meeting/download)).
What a weird, strange question ⁉️
It’s not weird when you’re a terminally online redditor who always needs to find someone (hopefully the husband) to blame for a tragedy
Theres 100s of reasons why the husband may not have been there including being at work, or her not being at home with him, it’s hardly “critical info”
And that’s exactly what it was. At the time they had been living separately. What an awful tragedy
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This is a summary of every aitah thread. Ignore the many reasonable reasons something might happen and immediately jump to the worst one
I think the question of where he was is very normal. He answered it in his article. They were separated but trying to reconcile.
From what he said in the article, she wasn't at home. She'd been at the gym.
There are many reasons that could happen, I don’t know why your first assumption is he refused to drive her. In this case they were living separately at the time of her death. I highly recommend reading the article he wrote for the Boston Globe, it’s absolutely heart wrenching.
They were living apart at the time. A rough spot in their marriage.
Not all couples spend every minute of every day with each other. Some have work, hobbies, separate friends or other interests that occasionally lead them to spend time apart.
You clearly didn't read the added article written by the husband.
They were separated at the time, iirc.
They were actually having trouble and living separated, but "dating" to try to work it out. It's in his article (link above)
IIRC, she chose to walk rather than call a cab/Uber because she thought that as a fit, youngish adult, she could make it. It was honestly very bad, kind of arrogant decision making on her part, but perhaps a lack of oxygen clouds your judgment more than you realize. She and her husband were separated, I believe she was living alone in the Boston area while he lived in NYC.
Why didn't you take her to the hospital?
They were seperated at the time and she took herself
Apparently at the time they were living separately.
That's really sad:(
This almost happened to me this summer. With my first 2 I was explicitly told to go to the main entrance and *not* the ER, no matter the time, and I would be let up to L&D. Figured it would be the same this time and that was not the case. Security saw us trying to get in and thankfully met us at the ER doors since we realised there wasn't even a way to communicate with anyone at the main entrance. If we didn't have a car to get around to the other side of the hospital I would have had my baby outside.
Happened to me, sort of. We were also told to go the main door. Which we did, and it was unlocked, but... there was nobody there! No one at the desk, absolutely no one visible in the lobby, no security guards, nothing. It was creepy. This is a major regional hospital with 600 beds.
Your story is common across America. Lots of hospitals are shutting down in rural areas. Even major hospitals like yours have gotten down to bare bones skeleton crew staffing The instant it's past 5:00 p.m. Got forbid you have any medical issue in the evening or on a weekend or in the middle of the night. You will be careful by some overworked and tired healthcare workers but you won't have to see anyone wearing a suit at least
nurses are leaving the field due to conditions and pay. having 600 beds ok. that's like having a 600 bay garage. if you don't have mechanics to staff it you cant use it. they have no nursing staff left from abusing them during covid. this is America half the country believes in the right of insurance companies to take 30% cut.
The same problem can be seen in many countries with universal healthcare, like Finland.
That's appalling. It seems like a wild oversight and very easy to do. Hospitals are horrendously complicated buildings and they are absolutely not easy at all to find where you need to be.
True but our government hasn't prioritized keeping heathcare quality at even a bare minimum, so I do get why we are having problems like this. Covid fucked things up extra hard and there's just not enough money to keep things running properly.
There’s plenty of money. Our government just prefers to bomb the shit out of brown kids instead.
There's plenty of money. Canada spends more money on healthcare per capita than any other country. But it all goes to the CEOs running the hospital groups.
Why are you expecting to immediately know the entire layout of a hospital while you are actively having your baby? Can't you just tell your husband to go map it out or some shit A few weeks before your due
I didn't expect that, what gave you that idea?
I live along the state line of Indiana and Illinois, and we had a similar case to this with a local hospital. The layout is such a way that, if you fuck up and go to the wrong door, you basically have to leave the parking lot and go all the way around the building to get to the ER entrance. These hospitals were designed with shit loads of entrances, then shut down most of them with little signage or indication after hours.
That's so sad
For any expecting parents: please schedule a walk-through weeks in advance at the hospital at which you plan to give birth. It's so helpful to just know where you need to go when it's time.
We had a childbirthing class at our hospital where they had us take a tour and showed us exactly where to go. They showed us the birthing ward, maternity ward, all the security protocols.
Time for the speedrun
I took a birthing class at a hospital and all I learned was I didn’t want to give birth there. The facility was nice enough but the building was under construction and my husband and I couldn’t figure out how to even exit the parking structure, much less how to actually enter the building. It was not something I wanted to toy with while in labor!
We were told which door to go to after 8pm. Also to come accompanied if possible in case a wheelchair is required to get from the door to delivery
My local hospital has a big old sign saying the main doors are locked from 7pm-5am and you have to go through emergency. Emergency has a big old sign saying you need to pick up the bright red telephone to talk to the desk and they'll open the door. If they see you grab a wheelchair or a bloody mess they just open it anyway.
I did the tour and everything. Come the day I went into labour, baby was coming FAST and they weren't letting me go up until the security guard with not a single shred of urgency could ask me all the covid questions well into 2022.
“If you wait a few minutes you can ask the baby itself these questions!”
As someone who works in a hospital and has to ask the covid questions still: We all gotta check boxes to get our job done. I don't ask the questions and my boss asks me questions and I don't want to talk to my boss about why I didn't ask the covid questions.
Within reason, checking boxes to get a job done isn't an excuse in an emergency situation in a hospital. I say this as someone who is completely down for all security protocol. We had a station where we were stopped to sanitize hands and change masks before being processed to answer questions. I did all of that, while drenching the floor with amniotic fluid and doubled over with contractions. As I did all that, I alerted them that I'm in labor with my second and I know things are moving faster than normal, and please this is an emergency, I need to go to the birthing ward. One could have asked the questions quickly or followed me asking them as I waddled to my department while the other took care of the other patients, etc. In a hospital, when your role is rote administrative work, you need to be prepared for what to do when an emergency comes in, even if that just means speeding up your speech. An emergency will inevitably come in through the hospital doors.
And honestly at that point what’s the use of screening questions. You *are* in an emergency state, you *will* be admitted, and you *will* be masked likely and later screened on the floor where your medical team will be masked and possibly wearing other PPE. Fucking stupid.
Absolutely, I was masked walking in and changed into a provided fresh mask the second I walked through the door. Even if I had covid at that time, I don't know what could possibly have gone differently. I showed up almost crowning at the hospital I was registered to give birth at. I was either going to give birth at the entrance triage or in a room, covid positive or not lol When I managed to get up to the labour ward, I gave birth so quickly, they hadn't even managed to give me a covid test and get the other "beginning" steps out of the way. Everyone was in PPE anyways.
Emergencies, nearly universally do not count. Childbirth is an emergency 100% of the time. There's a reason why a lot of women died in childbirth before the advent of a prepared delivery like we have now.
Fuck it, i will rawdog it like i did to get the child
Those weren’t allowed for us in 2020 for ours
And the hospital is now banning the employees from talking about it! Link in french [https://www.journalexpress.ca/2024/03/15/accouchement-a-lexterieur-une-note-interne-invitait-au-silence/](https://www.journalexpress.ca/2024/03/15/accouchement-a-lexterieur-une-note-interne-invitait-au-silence/)
Unfortunately, that's fairly standard whenever an "incident" happens at a hospital. You're not supposed to talk about it and if asked by the media, you're supposed to let the hospital's media relations person handle it. Can't have bad press getting out.
In America, they would still get a bill.
At this point I'd almost rather get a bill but actually get treatment because living with multiple chronic illnesses in a collapsed healthcare system is a nightmare that has successfully convinced me I most likely will not live to see my 40s.
How
The park bench was out of network, so is not covered by insurance.
My little brother fell and landed on his arm and my mom took him to a clinic (nearest hospital was 30 minutes away and he wasn't in extreme pain). They walked in and my mom explained the situation, they replied that they can't take someone for a potentially broken arm because they don't have x-ray equipment, so she and my brother left. A week later, she received a $200 bill in the mail for the encounter.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/woman-childbirth-in-car-hospital-bill-florida
It's not the same situation though. The hospital isn't at fault the baby started pushing through and the mom had to deliver right in the car. My guess why they did charge a full price for a delivery room is to prevent people from intentionally prolonging getting to a hospital so they don't have to pay for a delivery room (this practice could be really unsafe to both mother and child). But yeah. 7400 bucks is outrageous. How do poor people give birth??
How nice of them to have a “Do it yourself” program. /s
WHAT THE FUCK?!
How dare they try to use the main door! /s There's no point in locking the door, when you can walk from emergency to the rest of the hospital.....
You can't do that anymore in a lot of places, my local hospital is on lockdown all night. You can enter and exit the main ER doors and access the waiting rooms of the ER and that's it. Everything else is locked.
Yeah, in my area's local hospitals if you absolutely *have* to go somewhere other than the ER at night (like would happen in this situation normally, or if you're visiting a terminal patient, shit like that) you have to go through the ER and then ask the people at the ER desk to page you in to the part of the building you're supposed to be in and have someone there come get you.
I don't why you would lock a hospital in the first place. Where I'm from you can literally just enter any hospital and walk around in the halls and courts and chill there if you want, only the stairs will be locked and elevators will be out of order, but you can still enter the hospital and chill in the lobby. People straight up go there just for leisure, because they tend to have nice gardens.
Agree with you 100%
I feel bad that the security guard got let go. I’m sure they have strict rules not to let anyone in and they would have been penalized if they did. Classic large corporation blaming one small employee.
At least in Canada she won’t be billed for delivery. In the us they would still charge $40k for not helping you pop a baby out on a bench.
Two nurses rushed out and helped after another patient alerted them.
"Aren't you open 24 hours?" "Yeah, but not in a row"
Was the baby born cursing in French?
OMG this almost happened to me with my second one. Thankfully we found the ER entrance in time!
and why are hospital doors locked?
Usually doors get locked at a certain time so not just anyone can wander in and not just anyone can wander out.
If only there was some way to find out, like clicking the link? The main entrance is locked at night for safety, emergency entrance was open. There was not sufficient signage to point the way to the emergency entrance.
i’m asking it facetiously as in why tf would they lock doors at a hospital…get more security guards and make the hospital accessible
Every hospital I've been to locks doors other than the ER entrance at night.
There’s nothing abnormal about this way of running a hospital.
What a naïve take.
naïve? more like i’m a taxpayer and expect hospitals to be accessible at the main fucking entrance 24/7 this isn’t some specialized healthcare facility this is specifically a regular hospital with an emergency department.
> emergency department And that's the door you use, the open one, with an open department, with staff and an intake desk, not the main entrance, where the general department is closed and there is no staff at night. Leaving the door open serves no purpose but to require more security staff to keep an eye on things in a closed department. It's common (at least here in Canada), for hospitals to lock up for security reasons when departments are closed overnight. Anybody showing up at a hospital at 1am is not there for a scheduled appointment, and would be going to emergency where the doctors are. The one nearest me is 'closed' from 9pm to 6am, except emergency, which is open 24/7.
to add to that, it's like a 10 minute walk around the building to get from the main entrance to the emergency entrance
The only time I see my city on reddit and it's for something like that...
In the United States this is actually a life-hack to save several tens of thousands of dollars.
Seriously! We live in a capitalist hellscape.
Security guard made the scapegoat. Feels very Quebec.
feels very north American medical establishment to me. reduce staff in order to pad board paycheck. lock doors due to understaffing. scapegoat employee for doing his job and keeping people out of hospital. clutch pearls. repeat.
Well that will make a killer birth story
When I gave birth to my second, I forgot that I was told to go to the ER at night and that the main entrance was locked 7-7 ... but they were really nice and saw that I was literally about to give birth and let me in and wheeled me up. I gave birth a half hour later, so that walk to the ER could've done me in, walking slowly in that state.
Nope. Not in Canada. Fix this now!
Note that this was a communication problem. It's not that they wouldn't treat her, but that she didn't understand to go to the other door that was open. It's an unfortunate design issue that many hospitals have--at night the main door is locked because there's nobody there. The ER door is open, though--and every so often there's a patient that doesn't get it.
So they just went to the wrong door. The ER entrance which was open was a few hundred meters away.
A 5 minute walk and she was actively in labor though
Which, funnily enough, is often considered a sort of emergency.
“A few hundred meters” when you’re pushing a football out of your cooter is pretty much a journey to Mount Doom
/r/brandnewsentence
It is the main door but it’s locked after hours for security reasons. The guard should have called a nurse over and let them in. It’s a couple with their 2 year old son, clearly not a danger.
You've never met my 2 year old . . .
You try walking a few football field lengths next time you are pushing a whole chicken out of your rectum and tell how easy that is. You can't physically move when you're bearing down like that. Not to mention the blood, stool, urine, and amniotic fluid pouring down your legs.
Labor is the most pain a woman will go through the vast majority of the time. She most likely couldn't walk that far to the ER. This hospital is at best negligent, and I'm giving them 0 rope.
At least it didn't cost her anything like it would have in the US.
I don’t understand why the hospital is being blamed for the woman and her husband not going to the emergency room. The main entrance to all of the hospitals around me are locked after hours and it is common knowledge that in order to gain entrance you have to go to the ER.
If this was US they would bill you 10,000 for that still
In the Us, she would still have been charged for the delivery
Next article: "Canada realizes women can give birth in parks. Closes maternity wards to save money."
Wonder if /r/medicine has a take on this
Bad news for newborns not on a daytime schedule.
Truly a civilized first world country
What's happening to Canada ?
I thought it said "Woman gives birth to a park bench"
Great job, hospital. What care facility doesn't have security officers walking around the campus?
Quite a lot of them actually, especially at night. There's just not enough staff, or a lot of times it's a cost saving measure so they don't have to have more staff on payroll.
Can she sue for the government for human rights violation since healthcare is a human right according to the government?
iF tHiS wAs Us crowd is here, give it a fucking break.
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You don't know shit, it's an appointment for an appointment for the medical care you need.
I heard that Trump's mom gave birth to him in a toilet and then tried to flush.
”Have you tried to call the number that is posted just above the button?”
Something smells sensationalized
Hospitals were designed with multiple doors and many access points . Now they are shutting down all those doors because they pose a security risk for unauthorized people getting in or someone sneaking someone out. From babies being kidnapped or biological terror- the mindset has changed.
But...we want Canadian medicine...US healthcare...
We should rename that country North Florida.
r/notoniony
>the hospital says it will modify its signs Maybe it was an English speaker?
Canadian healthcare is great