Key takeaways:
- After suffering from a heart attack, George Kinch was lying on the floor, dazed for nearly an hour.
- George Kinch, 68, died of a vast heart attack at his Alma, P.E.I. workplace the previous month.
An ambulance takes an hour to arrive:
A lady from western P.E.I. says she watched her dad die of a massive heart attack at his workplace while an ambulance took almost an hour to reach from Summerside.
Gail Kinch got an urgent call at 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 20 from her dad’s chief at the potato storehouse where he worked in Alma.
She came to find 68-year-old George Kinch lying senseless on the freezing concrete floor, a towel beneath his head as somebody attempted to perform C.P.R. and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“Every minute that went by was a minute that we knew we might not get him back,” she stated.
The Alberton fire department was there, with recruit members doing their most promising to stabilize her dad’s illness. They tried a defibrillator with no chance.
“Is this where we say our goodbyes?” Kinch wondered.
And still, the ambulance wasn’t arriving. There was no unit available in West Prince that morning.
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Summerside is almost 70 kilometers away.
After 55 minutes, the emergency employees said there was no longer any expectancy that the Palmer Roadman could be kept and put a blanket over him.
“This is what we recognize him by, laying on a cold storage floor in minus-20 with the windchill that day,” stated Kinch.
“It’d just be lovely to have that closure that, you know, this isn’t going to happen to somebody else.”
‘A case of minutes’
To pursue that shutdown, Kinch wrote to her M.L.A., Liberal Hal Perry, telling him: “No one should have to stay this long in an emergency.”
Perry presented the case Friday in the P.E.I. legislature, reading Kinch’s note.
Source – cbc.ca
