Elderly Woman Dies in Waiting Room 

Jordanna Schriever, AdelaideNow 

June 4, 2010

Australia

ILEEN Promnitz could have lived if only someone had paid attention to her suffering. Instead she lay for six hours, unattended and dying, in a Queen Elizabeth Hospital corridor. She was paid no attention by staff until a member of the public noticed the grandmother of 13 had died. 

Yesterday, State Coroner Mark Johns found her March 2006 death could have been avoided."There was an unacceptable delay in this case," he said.
"It is wrong that a 79-year-old lady should be left for five to six hours only to die alone in the waiting room of the Emergency Department of one of the state's leading public hospitals.

"Had Mrs Promnitz arrived in the emergency department when it was less busy, one could confidently expect that she would have been seen sooner and her death may have been avoided."

He said the woman's condition was treatable. However, during the six hours before her death, she was twice checked by a nurse but no doctor.

"If her urinary tract infection had been treated earlier, it is quite possible that Mrs Promnitz would not have died," he said.

At autopsy, her cause of death was "sepsis due to urinary tract infection with Group B streptococci". In his findings, Mr Johns was critical of the hospital, which had categorised  Mrs Promnitz to be seen by a doctor within an hour of her arrival at 8pm, but was found dead by the daughter of a neighbouring patient six hours later at 2am.

At the time of her death, Mrs Promnitz was a resident of St Hilarion Nursing Home at Lockleys. Her family - which lives less than 1km from the hospital - was unaware she had been taken there until they were informed of her death.

Mr Johns made no recommendations about the hospital, which he said has since changed its practices.Those changes include posting a nurse in the emergency department whose sole role is to observe patients in the waiting room and a new 16-bed diagnostic and planning ward for faster diagnosis.

Instead, Mr Johns recommended that federal Health and Ageing Minister Nicola Roxon consider the "deplorable inadequacy" of GP services to aged care facilities in SA. "The support for nursing home patients by general practitioners in SA is simply not adequate," he said.

State Opposition health spokesman Duncan McFetridge said it was "completely unacceptable" patients were being made to wait for a long time. He said a 2009 report found the QEH performed worse than any emergency department in SA "only being able to admit 24 per cent of patients presenting to the ED within four hours".

Health Minister John Hill said that better systems and resources had been implemented in the four years since Mrs Promnitz's death.

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