Sabine Dietz addressing the public health care meeting in Sackville last week

“I’m here to bear witness,” former Sackville councillor Sabine Dietz said last week as she stood before senior officials from the Horizon Health Network and an audience of about 400 local residents at the Tantramar Civic Centre.

“I’m shaking and I’m exhausted from how I’ve had to deal with the system,” she said, adding that her family’s ordeal began on January 23rd when her 85-year-old mother went to the emergency room in Moncton suffering from chest pains before being taken to Saint John for heart surgery.

“We’ve been lucky as a family that there’s always been somebody with her,” Dietz said.

“She’s always had a family member there and you will not imagine how many failures of the system we caught and some that we couldn’t catch,” she added.

“The failures are manyfold — they go from prescribing the wrong blood thinner, to the waiting time in the ER for an 85-year-old who has pain in her chest, to lack of staff in Saint John to start the rehab right after the operation.”

Dietz praised doctors and nurses who took time to listen, but criticized bureaucrats for imposing a revolving-door policy for medical staff in the Moncton hospital’s intensive care unit.

“I don’t know how I can be more angry with the system forever circulating doctors, family doctors, through an intensive care unit where there’s no…continuity of care,” she said.

The harried ICU staff had no time to listen, she said, and failed to recognize that her mother was delirious when she asked them to stop all care, a decision the family quickly got reversed the next day.

‘Lumps of meat’

“There is really no recognition that there’s more than a body that’s lying there, more than a body that needs care, but actually the mind that needs care,” Dietz said.

“I have seen patients being treated as lumps of meat.  I’ve seen my mother treated that way,” she added.

“Any of us who have gone through that are injured by that system,” she said.

“There is an intense lack of listening to the next of kin throughout the system [and] there’s a lack of supporting next of kin.”

Dietz said her mother’s rehab treatment is scheduled to end on May 2nd and no one knows what will happen after that.

“I don’t know if she’s going to going to stay in Moncton or coming to Sackville. I have no idea,” she said, adding that the hospital’s wait-and-see attitude is painful for both her mother and her family.

‘Scared out of my wits’

“After she comes out of the hospital, I don’t think I want to go there because we all know what long-term care looks like and I’m scared out of my wits,” Dietz said.

She stressed that she does not blame medical staff, but does blame politicians and bureaucrats for fiddling with the health-care system and neglecting to recognize and fix its many failures.

“If you want talk to me about the problems or my family about all the problems in the system,” she told officials from Horizon, “I’m happy to talk about it.”

Horizon CEO Margaret Melanson thanked Dietz for sharing her story.

“I’m very apologetic for the deficiencies in our system that led to the issues and the anxiety and upset that you and your family have experienced.”

Melanson said she’d be happy to follow-up after the meeting and arrange for Dietz and her family to speak to Horizon’s patient representative.

“Really, it’s only by bringing forward these concerns that we can take action and obviously, address them,” she said.

To listen to Sabine Dietz’s story click on the media player below: