Sudbury man said to be released from hospital had actually died there

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A Sudbury woman is calling out deficiencies at Health Services North after being informed her brother had been released from hospital when the truth was he had died there the day before.

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Angela Vitiello, in a Facebook post days after her brother Allan St. Martin’s passing, also said an “extremely annoyed” clerk at the Ramsey Lake Health Centre in Sudbury told the family he’d already been released.

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“Instead of being able to grieve our loss, we are angry,” Vitiello wrote on Dec. 6.

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Jason Turnbull, HSN’s manager of communications and community engagement, told the National Post in an email that it is unable to comment on St. Marin’s situation “due to patient privacy.”

On Saturday, Nov. 30, Vitiello got a call from her niece, St. Martin’s daughter, worried she hadn’t been able to reach her father by phone and that he wasn’t answering the door at his apartment.

Vitiello, who also hadn’t heard from her older brother, feared he was ill or had fallen and had his daughter get the building superintendent to open the door.

“He wasn’t there,” she wrote.

Thinking her brother may have experienced complications with his diabetes, she directed his daughter to contact the hospital, where a clerk told her over the phone that no patient by that name had been admitted.

“I then called the hospital emergency department and the clerk I got on the phone told me — and I quote, ‘You are the 9th person that has called, I already told your niece, there is no one here with that name,’” Vitiello recounted, noting it had only been she and her niece who called.

“She was extremely annoyed.”

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The family, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly worried, contacting law enforcement and filing a missing persons report.

Around 2 p.m., Vitiello’s husband discovered a voicemail left by a Dr. Caruso asking his wife to contact the emergency department. The call came in at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday on the family’s landline.

Vitiello called the ER again and alleged the same clerk reiterated that St. Martin was not there, hadn’t been there, and that they needed to stop calling.

“I explained to her that Dr. Caruso had left a message on my answering machine to call the ER and she needed to find out why. She then proceeded to tell me that my brother had been at the ER but had been RELEASED.”

“So, now we are very confused and concerned because he was indeed missing.”

About an hour later, a different doctor contacted Vitiello and delivered news that her brother had died from cardiac arrest after arriving at the hospital by ambulance on Friday evening, and that two shocks to his heart failed to revive him.

According to Vitello’s post, a spokesperson from HSN patient relations contacted her five days later and was “extremely apologetic” for the breakdown in communications.

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The individual said the clerk she and the niece had spoken with wasn’t properly trained in reading the “code,” leading to the miscommunication about St. Martin’s whereabouts.

“This will forever be our experience,” Vitiello wrote. “A clerk who was not properly trained, who had zero compassion or empathy.”

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In its emailed statement, HSN said it seeks “to provide high quality compassionate care at all times to our patients and families.”

“When we receive complaints, our leadership team conducts a thorough exam of the patient’s care and experience to understand what happened, what gaps may exist, and plans are developed to address those gaps to ensure the care we provide is up to the standards we set out as an organization,” Turnbull wrote.

“We deeply apologize to anyone who has a negative experience at HSN, and encourage them to contact our Patient Relations team who helps to support patients and families through the complaint process.”

St. Martin, who was only four days from his 55th birthday, was an active member of his church community in Sudbury and had returned to school this fall to study mental health and addictions.

In posts made three days before his death, he posted about scoring high grades in several assignments.

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