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Hospital blamed for driver’s death
By Gurmukh Singh
The death of a Sikh bus driver from Brampton, a South Asian-dominated suburb of Toronto, in a hospital, allegedly due to negligence, has snowballed into a controversy with calls for a thorough probe into it.
Harnek Singh Sidhu, 52, who worked as a bus driver with Brampton Transit, was brought to the emergency wing of the newly opened hospital Nov 3 when he complained of a severe stomach pain. Ten days later he died of what his family says negligence by the medical staff. They allege that no doctor came to check Sidhu for 10 hours in the emergency ward.
They say that when they protested against the callous attitude of the staff, their male members were asked to leave the ward.
Only on Nov 5, when Sidhu’s condition further worsened, did they shift him to the intensive care unit where he stayed on life support systems till he died.
In the provincial assembly, Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman rejected the demand of opposition leader Howard Hampton for a probe into the death as well as the so-called P-3 (public-private partnership) scheme.
Under P-3, Hampton alleged, the private consortium devoted more money to raising the building, less to staff and patient care.
In fact, the focus of the whole controversy has now shifted from Sidhu’s death to P-3. And this $550-million hospital is the first to have been built under the scheme in Ontario, which otherwise runs a public health care system.
Under P-3, worked out between the government and a private consortium known as the Healthcare Infrastructure Company of Canada, the latter built the hospital with a contract to run catering, parking and a whole lot of services for 25 years. The public was to raise half the cost of $550 million through donations.
Interestingly, Sidhu’s family had reportedly contributed about $25,000 to the hospital. With critics such as Ontario Health Coalition and Brampton Health Coalition calling P-3 the negation of Canada’s respected public health care system, the issue will only hot up in the coming days as South Asians rally to the cause.
They have planned a protest rally at the hospital Sunday, demanding more beds and more doctors.
To defuse the crisis, the hospital management met Sikh community and gurdwara leaders and the local Punjabi media, promising to address the issue and provide better health care.
Brampton and the neighbouring Mississauga - the two large suburbs of Toronto -- have a very large concentration of Indians and Pakistanis. Not surprisingly, the area has four South Asian MPs - Gurbax Malhi, Navdeep Bains, Ruby Dhalla and Wajid Khan - in the Canadian House of Commons. Indo-Asian News Service
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