A Calgary woman is looking for answers after suffering a miscarriage in a hospital waiting room.

Accompanied by her husband, Rick, Rose Lundy went to the emergency room at the Peter Lougheed Centre with abdominal pain last week.

Rick Lundy says he approached hospital nursing staff for help five times before his wife, Rose, miscarried in a waiting room.
(CBC)

She was three months pregnant with her third child. She says staff told her there was a shortage of beds and she'd have to wait.

"I don't know why it happened that way, but it was wrong," she said.

Woman felt humiliated

"We were letting them know what was going on. As I'm sitting there, I'm losing tissues out of my body and blood is pooling all around me and it was too much."

Lundy said about 30 patients were in the waiting room.

"I felt helpless. It was humiliating to go through that in the public eye," she said.

Rick Lundy said he approached nursing staff five times, begging for help.

"It was a very dangerous situation. I would think that someone would have come out and took a look at what's going on. That never happened. Even in the later stages, that never happened."

Case under review

The hospital is reviewing the case.

Caroline Hatcher, the director of emergency for the Calgary Health Region, says the sickest patients have priority in a busy waiting room.

"We're always trying to ensure that we bring patients in as quickly as we can. The challenges we're faced with as nurses and physicians is that we do have overcrowding," she said.

Brian Mason, leader of the Alberta NDP, called the family's experience dreadful.

"We should not be having such overcrowded waiting rooms in hospitals. The emergency room situation in this province is ongoing and the lack of planning is evident."