Chaoulli back in court, but this time it's to speak about a patient's death

Dr Jacques Chaoulli (right), the man whose Supreme Court case against the government of Quebec managed to overturn sections of the province's health insurance laws, spoke yesterday in court in front of a public inquiry into the January death of a 77-year-old in the waiting room of a Montreal walk-in clinic.

The man, who reportedly presented with an ankle injury before turning "purple" and having trouble breathing, wasn't asked why he was in the waiting room before he died in his seat; he was only told to sit down. Another patient in the waiting room resorted to calling 911 for instructions on giving CPR but a nurse told her not to touch him and soon thereafter Dr Chaoulli came out to examine him, decided he could not be resuscitated, and asked a nurse to call an ambulance. "I concluded that this patient must have been dead already a long enough time - I had no way of knowing how long - but long enough," he was quoted as saying in the Montreal Gazette. He declined to move the body out of the waiting room after the call was placed because he thought it was "the scene of a crime," he said.

"It was a really unusual event and the patients had an understandable reaction of distress, even of revolt," Dr Chaoulli said. A coroner will make recommendations in several months, after the inquiry hearings wrap up, reported the Le Journal de Montréal.

The clinic where this all occurred, Clinique médicale Viau, in St. Léonard, is one of several dozen Montreal "network-clinics," a new model of healthcare delivery initiated the same year Dr Chaoulli went to court to fight against private-healthcare restrictions. Network-clinics -- which "bridge the private and public sectors," as Dr Albert Benhaim, the Chair of the Network-Clinic Table, wrote in 2006 in DRMG Express, a newsletter (PDF) published by the city of Montreal's health agency -- connect patients with doctors in both the public system and doctors who have opted out of the public system and charge their patients directly. Dr Chaoulli opted out of the public system years ago.

Photo: Liam Maloney, National Review of Medicine

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