NORTH BAY - Dan Yang says she went to the North Bay Regional Health Centre (NBRHC) emergency room in severe pain—but instead of leaving feeling cared for, she left feeling dismissed and overlooked.
Yang, 54, a software engineer who moved to North Bay in 2021, says she arrived at the ER around 5:20 p.m. last Sunday, with intense eye pain and profuse tearing.
The pain started after she accidentally swam with her contact lenses in.
“At the time I was telling them the pain was between seven and eight,” Yang told BayToday, describing her triage assessment. “The eyes were really wet. My face was flooded.”
She was given a numbing eye drop, which she said worked “like magic,” but was told she could only have three doses.
Yang says the waiting room was nearly empty when she arrived, and the posted wait time was about three hours. But over the next several hours, that number fluctuated unpredictably.
“It keeps jumping between two hours and 46 minutes and five hours and three,” she said.
According to her, she returned to the triage window three times to request pain relief, using her final dose about four hours after arrival. When the pain returned worse than before, she followed staff instructions to request re-evaluation.
“At that time, the pain was probably around nine,” said Yang. “My legs were shaking.”
After waiting several minutes at the window, Yang says she knocked her water bottle on the counter in frustration. That’s when the staff responded.
“The nurse who gave me the third dose of the painkiller showed up right away,” she said, noting that the staff had changed over since her first dose of eye drops. “She asked, 'What’s the problem?' I said, 'Obviously you are.'”
But instead of further medical attention, Yang says security was called.
“Within about three minutes, the door opened, and in came three or two security personnel, all about six feet tall, fully equipped with batons and bulletproof vests,” she said. “There was no de-escalation practice ... My pain wasn’t the priority.”
Yang says she had been waiting quietly for nearly five hours and showed no prior signs of aggression.
“They knew I was reasonable … there were no threats whatsoever,” she said. “I think that security was unnecessary.”
Yang says she left without treatment around 10 p.m. The next day, she went to Sudbury hospital and was treated immediately, according to Yang. Doctors there diagnosed a corneal abrasion.
Yang says she has filed a complaint with NBRHC but has not received a response. She hopes that sharing her story highlights the need for better triage reassessment and de-escalation training.
"The resources should not be put largely out of proportion into the security personnel,” she said. “The priority should be patient care.”
Yang believes the hospital has the resources to do better.
"For privacy reasons, we cannot share information about specific patient situations," Kim McElroy, Director of Communications at NBRHC, wrote in an email to BayToday regarding the situation.
"I can tell you that we triage patients and urgent patients are seen according to priority. Should someone have a complaint about their care, we have a complaint process that patients are encouraged to follow."