New Brunswick man suffers heart attack in hospital parking lot as E.R. closes

FREDERICTON — Grant Jordan was driving to a friend’s house on Aug. 31 when he started feeling tightness in his chest. He immediately returned home and asked his wife, Naomi, to take him to the hospital, a five-minute drive away.

They arrived at the Sussex Health Centre at 8:48 p.m., but the hospital in southern New Brunswick had closed 18 minutes earlier — the result of a “temporary” change made two years ago. Using an intercom, Jordan told a hospital employee that he thought he was having a heart attack.

“And they said, ‘Well, we’re closed. So if you want, I can call 911 for you,'” Jordan, 49, said in a recent interview from his home in Piccadilly, N.B., recalling how he had to retreat to the parking lot, pain radiating through his jaw, elbows and ears.

It was 9:24 p.m. by the time an ambulance arrived. At the hospital in Saint John, 75 kilometres away, Jordan was immediately taken to an operating room where two stents were inserted into arteries leading from his heart.

The couple is now calling on the provincial government to do something about hospitals that are having to close early.

Horizon Health Network, which oversees the Sussex Health Centre, did not respond to a request for comment.

“I was just lying there on the sidewalk in the parking lot,” Jordan said. “I was just in a lot of pain, and I wanted it to stop.”

He confirmed that two hospital employees in Sussex eventually offered him some nitroglycerine — a drug used to relieve chest pain during a heart attack. But they told him they could lose their jobs for helping someone after the emergency room had closed, he said.

“It was pretty close to a widow-maker,” his wife said, adding that her husband’s chance of survival was pegged at 20 per cent. “It’s pretty bad when the malls and coffee shops are open later than the hospital is.”

New Brunswick’s health-care system has come under intense scrutiny as the province prepares for a election on Oct. 21.

Critics have taken aim at Premier Blaine Higgs’s majority government for responding to health-care labour shortages by hiring private companies that offer travel nurses, who work on temporary assignments across the health network.

The government spent almost $174 million on travel nurse contracts between Jan. 1, 2022, and Feb. 29, 2024.

Hospitals were given the go-ahead to sign these contracts after the death of a patient in a Fredericton hospital emergency room in July 2022.

Paula Doucet, president of the New Brunswick Nurses Union, has said the money should have been used to hire more than 1,000 nurses, which would ease shortages in hospitals and other parts of the health-care system.

The provincial government needs to make health care a priority, Jordan said.

“Why can’t we pay (doctors and nurses) to stay and work here?” he asked. “It shouldn’t really be that big a deal.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.

Hina Alam, The Canadian Press