An 8-month-old baby died Wednesday in Montreal after being rushed by police to hospital before paramedics arrived at the scene.
Updated yesterday at 7:42 p.m.
The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) did not want to comment on the event since it will be assessed by the Coroner’s Office.
An emergency call was received at Urgences-santé around 9:07 a.m. for a baby in respiratory distress on Lincoln Street in downtown Montreal.
In the absence of an emergency medical dispatcher available at that exact moment to take the call, the information was transmitted by 911 to Urgences-santé in written form, as is the usual procedure.
The call was then assigned a priority 3 call, that is to say that an ambulance is then sent to the scene, but without activating its sirens.
At the time, Urgences-santé was unable to contact the author of the call again for more details on the baby’s state of health, spokesperson Jean-Pierre Rouleau said on Wednesday. .
Maximum priority
However, 12 minutes later, a second call from 911 established that his state of health had deteriorated.
A priority code of 0, the most urgent, was then established, and a second emergency vehicle was sent to the scene.
Arrived on the scene even before the paramedics, the SPVM police officers from neighborhood station 12, the one covering the territory of Westmount, west of downtown, found the mother on the sidewalk with her baby in her arms. Given the urgency of the situation, they then decided to transport the child themselves to the nearest hospital.
According to our information, they tried to call Urgences-santé to request the presence of an ambulance as soon as possible. Faced with the delay, however, they felt they could not wait and took him to the Montreal General Hospital, not far from there.
Contacted following the event by the SPVM, the Bureau of Independent Investigations (BEI) ruled that there was no need to open an investigation into this intervention.
“It was very urgent to bring the child to the hospital, so they made this decision […]. The decision was made not to launch the investigation because it was not a police intervention, but an aid intervention,” confirmed BEI spokeswoman Mercedes Pacho.
The protocols respected,
says Health Emergencies
Arrived on the scene a minute after the departure of the police, at 9:21 a.m., the paramedics received the mandate to join them at the hospital where the infant had been transported in order to transfer it to a pediatric center.
The child was then in critical condition. He would be dead soon after. According to our information, the baby of a few months already presented serious health problems. The two SPVM agents who took part in transporting him were treated for nervous shock.
Urgences-santé affirms that this sad tragedy is in no way due to the lack of personnel which has regularly affected its service in recent weeks.
On several occasions, especially on weekends, nearly half of the ambulance vehicles that should have been on the road in Montreal were absent, for lack of personnel available to drive them.
Our protocols were followed to the letter. The assignment of the ambulance vehicle was immediate. The desired level [de personnel] was reached today. This is not related to the lack of manpower.
Jean-Pierre Rouleau, spokesperson
health emergencies
In addition to the coroner’s inquest, the Urgences-santé corporation, which serves the territories of Montreal and Laval, does not intend to investigate the course of the events since a priori, everything took place in a compliant manner.
“We generally check compliance, but everything seems to be compliant. But clearly, there will be a global coroner’s investigation in this case, ”says Jean-Pierre Rouleau.
With the collaboration of Daniel Renaud, The Press