Edmonton family doctor Dr. Guy Blais is grieving the unexpected loss of his wife Elaine Warren-Blais — a death he and his family believes could have been prevented.
“In medicine, we have this thing about the ‘golden hour’ — that if you get somebody treated within the hour, they’re more likely to survive,” Blais said.
But on a Friday morning six weeks ago, Blais said that critical time between life and death came and went — during which his 65-year-old wife’s condition deteriorated.
“(From) the time of the first 911 phone call to the time (help) arrived was about an hour and 24 minutes,” Blais said. “So the EMTs were working against time when they came to get her.”
In the early morning hours of July 24, Elaine got out of bed and collapsed.
“She fainted and hit her head. I then tried to get her up, and she fainted again,” Blais said.
“I knew there was a problem.”
Elaine became cold, clammy and short of breath. Being a doctor, Blais knew she needed to get to the hospital immediately.
Blais said he called 911 at 4:52 a.m. and dispatch took his information, but wasn’t able to say when an ambulance would arrive.
Elaine’s condition declined. She wasn’t able to stand or walk and Blais, being unable to get her to a vehicle on his own, said he called 911 again about 40 minutes later.
“I basically said the same thing that I said before — that we need an ambulance right away, she wasn’t getting better. They told me they would take the information.
“I said, ‘Can you tell me when an ambulance is coming?’ He said, ‘No, we can’t.'”
An ambulance finally arrived at 6:17 a.m.
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“While they’re assessing her, she lost consciousness again and had a cardiac arrest in our front room,” Blais said, adding EMS asked for more help to be sent to the home in the Riverbend area.
Several other EMS units quickly arrived to assist with performing CPR, starting an IV and getting Elaine loaded into the ambulance and off to the University of Alberta Hospital.
She coded again on the way to hospital.
“They did the cardiac resuscitation, shocked her twice and so on but they couldn’t get her heartbeat back in normal rhythm,” Blais said, explaining she was declared dead shortly after arriving at the U of A Hospital.
“They said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.'”
Elaine died six weeks ago today.
The family is still waiting for the medical examiner to determine her cause of death and in the meantime, Blais filed a complaint with Alberta Health Services.
“There is a crisis in Alberta Health Services, this is just one part of it.”
Elaine’s widow and sister are both speaking out about a health-care system they say is fractured beyond repair.
“They’re arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean. The ship has already sunk. You can’t fix it the way it is right now,” Elaine’s sister Mona Warren said on Friday.
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“It actually has to be swept away and a new system brought in.”
Blais and Warren both have high praise for front-line emergency workers who treated Elaine.
“I’m not faulting the EMTs and I’m not faulting paramedics,” Warren said.
“They did the best that they could.”
Ambulances and their crew being stuck at hospital, waiting for their patient to be admitted, has been a choke point in the health-care system for years in Alberta. Warren suspects that played a role in her sister’s case.
“The system needs to change, to be able to free (paramedics) up so that they actually go out and do the work that’s required.”
Not enough people staffing a health-care system stretched thin is not a new story in Alberta, but Blais and Warren say tragedies like theirs highlight the gaps patients are falling through.
“If they could have responded in the timely manner that it normally should take an ambulance in the city of Edmonton, I believe Elaine would have survived and we wouldn’t be here today,” Warren said.
“That’s what really, really frustrates me.”
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Emergency Health Services Alberta said it is looking into what happened.
“An investigation is underway to better understand the circumstances surrounding this call,” the organization said in a statement Friday.
“Due to patient privacy, we cannot comment further on the specifics of this incident at this time. EHS-Alberta takes concerns about emergency response times very seriously. We know how important it is for Albertans to have confidence in the emergency medical services they rely on, and we are committed to providing timely, safe and reliable care.”
The family that Elaine Warren-Blais left behind doesn’t just want lessons to be learned from their tragedy — they want action.
“My concern is that this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” said Blais.
“It needs to be fixed.”
Dr. Blais, I am so sorry for your loss. This is truly egregious, appalling and unacceptable.
This system needs to be fixed NOW. Not tomorrow NOW.
A month ago our 19 year old son had a grand mal epileptic seizure at five o’clock in the morning. This was a prolonged major seizure that was horrifying. We weren’t sure if he would continue breathing. I ran out to the street pleading with the 911 operator to please hurry. It took the EMS 22 minutes. One guy in a SUV. He saunterd up to the door with a first aid kit. We were loosing our minds. I have a great deal of respect for first responders, but this fella had no sense of urgency. An ambulance came about 10 minutes later and took him to the ER. Thankfully he is okay.
This beautiful soul was lost because the beuragrats who are supposed to operate this service are unaccountable, cowardly and afraid to make decisions and overpaid. They treat decision-making like a game of “hot potato” and delegating responsibility seems to be their only true passion.
SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING! Makes me want to puke.
The root cause is the lack of medical staff… starting with hospital wards. Not enough staff means that some beds cannot be used in wards. Without available beds in wards, the Emergency Department has to hold on to treated emergency patients until a bed in a ward becomes available. With ER beds full, paramedics have to stay with the patients they brought to the ER… instead of being able to respond to emergency calls in the community.
Make you a bet multiple ambulances were tied up because of drug addicts who don’t pay tax. We pay taxes for health services but when it comes time it’s not there. People that don’t contribute shouldn’t be getting service that other people pay for.
this reflects on smith.
god knows what will become Alberta if separatist win
These comments cannot be trusted. They are all edited.
To whoever is changing my comments to suit their purposes…and deleting respectful comments…you are an a s s.
These comments are being edited. My comment has been conpletely changed…my situation and wait times eliminated from my previous comment.
We give more to the Indians for their Casinos than we use to fund health care!
I believe there should be a dedicated ambulance service and outpatient clinic for the drug addicts. Then the rest of society can have timely access to ambulances and ER services. Doctors in the ERs are overwhelmed with the sheer volume of overdoses. This doesn’t belong in the ER. Our ambulances are continuously in use to often the same person, three times in the same day.
A big part of the problem is the misuse of EMTs to treat addicts overdosing. EMTs regularly report treating overdose after overdose their entire shift. It’s time to prioritize people who aren’t deliberately ingesting contaminated opiates.
Yes, addiction is a mental illness, but there is an element of choice. I am an alcoholic in recovery for 22 years. I CHOOSE not to take a drink. No one handed me my sobriety, and there’s no reason the addicts out in the street can’t do the same.
Stelmach and Redford killed the system. No provincial debt and 100 dollar a barrel oil. What happened to all the infrastructure and services that were to be rebuilt from years of sacrifice? Maybe as Mr. Thomas Lukasuk. The deputy premier under Redford.
Don’t you just love politicians playing russian roulette with your life ? They’re so say, tasked with welfare of the populace, yet here we are hoping our loved one can get the medical help they need before they die waiting.
Condolences to the family.
I’ll also be voting Yes to the referendum.
This isn’t just happening in Alberta. The whole country is in a serious healthcare decline. A few years ago I fell and broke my skull. The ambulance didn’t take long but once in the hospital it took 20 hours to be seen by a doctor. When my wife asked them to please help me at the 15 hour mark they said that I was still conscious so it’s not a real emergency. I was technically conscious, ie: my eyes were open. I was, in fact completely unconscious. Completely unresponsive. Turns out a brain injury can make you look awake when you’re not, who knew? Oh well, at least the surgery happened before the bleeding in my brain killed me.
This is why when my daughter had a petite maul after having double leg surgery I threw her into the back of my SUV and did 150 through downtown Red Deer to the hospital. EMS is completely unreliable in their response times. Not the fault of the front line staff. 100% on politicians and their appointed lackies. When politics is less about getting re-elected and more about serving the people, then and ONLY then will we see real change and real improvement.
When you need to shirk responsibility you can always hide behind the flimsy and cowardly ” no comment due to patient privacy” quote
Maybe we should stop funding the healthcare of people that are not Canadian citizens, and abuse the system.
Rob Wise, we have the money NOW. Our current joke of a Premier just chooses not to use it.
One of the things about Alberta Independence, we would have the oil revenues like Norway to have a working health care system
Hope ucp soon suffers same fate.
This is Alberta. Ralph Klein’s cuts to social services has left Alberta with a major deficit in that department. It would likely be $25 billion to fix that. The UCP made more cuts to social programs in Alberta. Both Ralph Klein and the UCP had similar goals to make private for profit healthcare in Alberta, while making their rich friends even richer. Do people not think that this will cause more problems? When people vote, what were they thinking?
On Friday my Dr wanted me to get a blood test regarding my heart. I left his office to find a lab but guess what! 2-4 hour wait. Then the public labs are closed until next Tuesday – happy long weekend! Don’t develop any health issues while all our labs are on holiday. F-ing ridiculous.
Just googled Hospital Wait Times around Edm Sat Sept 5 8pm. Lowest is 2 1/2 hrs in St Albert; highest is 6 1/2 hrs in Sherwood Park. Many more will die before this is fixed. EMERGENCY MEANS I NEED HELP NOW!!!!!!!
“Due to patient privacy?” Meaning the deceased, Elaine Warren-Blais? Wow. That is some ultra-advanced, next-level, feckless droidspeak.
i work downtown in the heart of the inner city. There are dozens of ambulance calls everyday to attend to the homeless drug addicts and their overdoses. Sickening but easy to see that there will be many times where ambulances will not arrive on time for everybody. I’m angry andthis family has every right to be angry
How about driving her to the hospital?
Wayne Zeke,
I hope you’re feeling better now and have been taken care of since that terrible wait time. It’s disgusting that the public has to wait so long to get the UCP slime out of power. The Lies have caught up to Danielle Smith and her bunch. All the Best in your Health :)
Dee Ironside
Maybe get Rid of the MAGA UCP!!
You folks do know that surgeons are only allowed so many surgery’s per week. The rest of their time, I guess they just play golf?
But pumping more and more dollars into the health care system has not fixed anything up til now. Maybe time to try other ideas.
For those advocating for a hybrid mix of public and private healthcare, that isn’t the success you think it is. PSWs (public sector workers, including nurses and teachers), were never given pay increases when the NDP were in power. The NDP didn’t treat them like dirt, like the UCP do, and the NDP had suffered an oil price shock, from a steep decline in oil prices, and an empty bank account because these pseudo Conservatives and Reformers cheated Alberta out of its oil and tax wealth that Peter Lougheed intended us to have. Albertans have a hard time learning their lesson, and look at where this has gotten us. Do you realize how big of a mistake it was to have the UCP in power? They make their rich friends even more rich, while everyone else struggles.
For those of you blaming the NDP or immigrants for these issues in Alberta with our healthcare system problems, that doesn’t have any basis in reality. It’s false.
Start all those years ago with premier Ralph Klein. Look at all the cutbacks he made to the public healthcare system. Hospitals were not given what they needed to function, if they managed to avoid being blown up. There are hospitals in Alberta that are boarded up. Thousands of nurses had to relocate out of Alberta, or had to take early retirement, because they were given pink slips. Did anyone expect the NDP to magically fix all of that in their one term in office? The NDP were getting new hospitals built, had even started getting a superlab built, which was another important thing, and even solved the issues with DynaLife. The UCP stopped all of that.
The UCP didn’t get any new hospitals built, wasted so much money stopping the much needed superlab from being built, and threw away $125 million on nationalizing DynaLife Labs. MH Care (Corrupt Care) is $614, or even more. $80 million on Tylenot, from Turkey. $2.3 billion squandered on the silios of AHS. Danielle Smith’s intentions as the Wildrose leader was to have AHS made into silos, which those in the medical field warned against. Immunizations from Covid-19, measles and the flu were never encouraged by the libertarian UCP, and look at where that got Alberta, which wasn’t good. Danielle Smith specifically made a campaign promise, three years ago that the UCP would give full support to the public healthcare system in Alberta. That clearly isn’t happening. Anything to get the UCP elected.
A badly funded public healthcare system isn’t going to properly function, no matter how big or small the population is. The Alberta Is Calling campaign, was from Danielle Smith. Another time, she was talking about some electoral imbalance and wanted Alberta’s population to rival that of Ontario and Quebec. She was on some far right wing podcast discussing that. Red Deer was even mentioned in her desires and goals to equal Calgary and Edmonton for its population.
Because Danielle Smith is trying to have private for profit healthcare in Alberta, the federal health minister and Mark Carney should stop it.
And the insane amount of immigration into the country due to the progressive liberal government wanting a voting block to stay in power has nothing to do with it? The slew of people leaving Canada because they see what’s happening does effect things, but when you have as an example 50 doctors to look after a million people, do you not think there is going to be a lot of people not getting to that “golden hour”
Look at the root cause, not someone or something else because they are a convenient scape goat.
And of course, the mainstream media of Canada be it global or cbc will never report the truth because they are loyal to their idealogy and the money the federal government gives them to be a propaganda machine in the country, just like communist China
Exhibiting stroke symptoms…I waited 9.5 hrs at one ER…another 10.5 hrs at another ER without ever getting past Triage. My blood pressure was @ 195. I suffered a TIA shortly after getting home. AHS is completely broken. people are dieing. How many more before AHS acknowledges there is a problem? No where…is this acceptable.
Firstly, I am sorry for the loss of your wife! Alberta Health Services into a quagmire or shifting blame, etc! Time for a complete overhaul, starting at the top! Too many managers of managers and not enough staff working the floor!
Point is made. Smith is allowing doctors to offer private medicine. That will not free up doctors in the system, it will take them away, as paying customers demand more care for their dollar. Changing upper management, and adding more staff and overhead is not helping. Promoting health care training, and subsidising it will. Allowing and paying for more non-critical care will. When not solved, a non-critical problem means more trips to ER for the symptoms.
Maybe a useful number would be the number of trips for a problem before it gets solved…
Naturally, the NDP still believe the only solution is to continue pouring more tax dollars into union wages (like they did during the short time they were in power).
A solution I advocated many years ago, was to have a hospital EMT team that would tend the newly arrived patient thus freeing up the mobile EMTs to get back ‘on the road again’. These inhouse EMTs would wait with the patient in the ER hallways.
But any radical suggestions like that was always resisted by the nurses union as jurisdiction encroachment. I guess nothing has changed but people still dying waiting for help.
Sorry for the loss of your wife. But if this happened to be any other civilian, it wouldn’t be a thought to make a change. only because he is a doctor something will change because of this horrible situation.
The NDP threw tens of billions of dollars at the health care system when they were in power. Did they fix it? No. Alberta needs to copy the public/private health care systems of other countries that have systems that work.
Ucp will somehow blame it on the feds, docs, immigrants, or that it was summer season, and anything else she can distract with..
Ucp voters deserve such outcomes.
Thanks, Dani! You have seriously fucked Alberta’s healthcare system.
For anyone who voted for the UCP, this is all on you, as much as it is on the UCP. Danielle Smith wasn’t telling the truth about maintaining public healthcare in Alberta, and creating silos out of AHS, and at a great expense, has cost Albertans their lives. It’s apparent that Danielle Smith wants private for profit healthcare in Alberta. Alberta voters have to stop being stubborn, stop being complacent, and get the UCP out of power. Many Albertans are needlessly suffering from the UCP’s atrocious polices.
90 minutes for response from a 911 call!? I can understand this as someone living several miles from a major center. But for someone in Edmonton this is totally ridiculous!
This is terrible. RIP. Condolences to her family.
Vote for any party but the UPC in the next election. We desperately need a government that puts the needs of Albertans ahead of helping their friends make money by privatizing our health system.
Very sad situation, I guess you would call it government under reach. Sad sad sad !
RIP Elaine.