St. Catharines woman dies after delayed return from Jamaica

“It’s awful. It’s a freaking tragedy,” said her daughter Shannon Horner.

She said her mother started having difficulty breathing shortly after arriving in Jamaica, and was rushed to a Montego Bay hospital by ambulance.

While on way to the hospital, her mother suffered from respiratory failure and cardiac arrest, she said.

Although medical workers in Jamaica resuscitated her, she never regained consciousness.

During the more than a week she stayed in hospital in Jamaica awaiting to be transported back to St. Catharines, Beckerley-Murphy also developed pneumonia, sepsis and a “horrific bed sore,” her daughter said.

Beckerley-Murphy’s insurance provider, CAA Niagara, told the family no beds were available in Ontario to accommodate her — relaying information CAA said it received from CritiCall Ontario, a provincially funded organization that facilitates the repatriation of patients who become critically ill or injured while travelling outside the country.

Both Niagara Health and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, however, said beds were available, and a bed was eventually found to accommodate Beckerley-Murphy at St. Catharines hospital, where she was admitted on April 16.

Horner said her mother “should have been home eight days sooner.”

“That’s eight days that our family will never get back,” she said.

If she had been brought home earlier, Horner wonders if things might have turned out differently.

“That will always be a question in my mind,” she said.

It’s a situation that happens far too often, said Will McAleer, executive director of Travel Health Insurance Association of Canada (THIAC).

He said situations such like Beckerley-Murphy’s family faced “speak to a challenge that our industry has had for some time.”

McAleer said most incidents go unreported, as ill or injured Canadians are forced to remain in hospital in foreign countries with no indication of when they will be able to return home.

Although in a statement last week a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said “CritiCall will always find a bed available to treat crucially ill patients,” McAleer said the system might not be as responsive as patients and families need it to be.

“What we’re finding, particularly in Ontario, is that the CritiCall solution helps sometimes, but it is not as timely as is often needed,” he said.

“With challenges to get beds in emergency rooms (ER) in Ontario as it is, it seems to us that the message they’re sending is that individuals, if they’re travelling, will be graded on a difference scale,” he said.

“For instance, if you were to suffer a medical emergency in Ontario, you show up at the ER and you’re provided that treatment. But if you’ve been travelling, they say ‘You need to wait until we say we can find a bed for you.’ That is a challenge, and more often than not they’re long delays.”

As a result, McAleer said patients are often left in hospitals around the globe without any indication about when and if they can be transferred home.

“We don’t think that’s an equitable level of accessibility that we would expect under universal health care,” he said.

He said THIAC has been trying to work with government officials to address issues it has faced when working to bring Canadian patients home.

“We’ve tried. We’ve done media advisories, and we’ve certainly commented on stories, but we haven’t been able to get any real traction with the government. But we would absolutely love to sit down and talk about it.”

McAleer said THIAC issued a warning for travellers in January, in anticipation of ongoing delays for patients in need of medical care.

“The insurance industry is designed to pay for eligible emergency medical treatment and bring patients home at the safest possible opportunity. Our goal is to ensure that travellers get the treatment they require and, in cases of serious illness, are stabilized and brought back home to recover,” McAleer said in the advisory.

“The industry is increasingly encountering logistical challenges in confirming patient transfers back to their local hospitals because of bed availability. That’s not good for a patient who’s experienced a health emergency far from home and wants to be close to family and friends in a familiar environment.”

St. Catharines MPP Jennie Stevens said she plans to take action.

“The end of life is such a crucial part of saying goodbye and healing with your family,” she said.

“No family should ever have been robbed of that due to systemic failures.”

She said she was amazed by the number of people she has met in the past few days who shared fond memories of Beckerley-Murphy.

“My heart goes out to her family and the entire community and all that loved her. There are so many people in the past few days that wanted to highlight what a wonderful person she was,” Stevens said.

Horner said her mother’s final trip was to be a celebration, a few weeks after the lung cancer that threatened her life went into remission.

At one point during her cancer treatments, Beckerley-Murphy was unconscious in intensive care when her then boyfriend Ted Murphy told her: “Listen Kelly, if you wake up, I’ll marry you,” Horner said.

She said they were married for less than 10 weeks when her mother died.

“He (Ted Murphy) is going to get her death certificate before he gets their marriage certificate,” Horner said. “It’s absolutely tragic. This didn’t need to happen.

“Even though I just suffered through a tragedy, maybe we can make sure no other family has to experience this,” she said. “How do I make sure this doesn’t happen to anybody else?”

Stevens said she plans to do everything she can to ensure it does not happen to anyone else.

“I’ve committed myself and will continue to take action to do everything I can so we can make sure this is the last time this happens,” she said.