'I still haven't grieved': Families want apology for loved ones exposed to COVID-19 in hospital who died

Lloyd Hodgins was a jokester with a good heart.

Hodgins, 82, fractured his hip in October and received surgery at Boundary Trails Health Centre between Morden and Winkler, Man.

He tested negative for COVID-19 after being transferred to hospital in Portage la Prairie. Family expected he'd rehabilitate there and be back at his MacGregor care home cracking wise with friends and staff in no time.

Then he got COVID-19; he died Nov. 8. Hodgins and three other patients who had eaten together in the dining room of the locked Portage District General Hospital rehab unit tested positive, said his daughter Val Alderson.

Beyond being informed of that detail by hospital staff before he passed, Alderson says there was no followup. Family was left to wonder how this could happen, she said.

"You know what would be nice? An apology, a written apology to the family: 'I am so sorry that we didn't fulfil our obligation as a health-care provider to protect your loved one,'" said Alderson, who worked for years as a home care nurse before retiring recently.

A CBC News analysis suggests there have been more than seven dozen deaths linked to COVID-19 exposures amid outbreaks in hospital settings since the beginning of the pandemic.

Alderson's family is one of several struggling to grieve the loss of a loved one who entered a Manitoba hospital COVID-free only to be exposed to the virus there and die.

Bioethicist and former social worker Kerry Bowman has spent decades alongside patients and families navigating the hospital and critical care systems.

WATCH | Administrators have obligation to review hospital infection deaths with families: bioethicist

He said it's reasonable for families to want more details and an apology.

"When people come to hospitals it's obviously to get better, to heal and to move forward with their lives, and when the exact opposite of that happens because of the hospital experience, rather than the illness itself, you cannot blame families that find this psychologically profoundly difficult," said Bowman, a professor at the University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

"Often what happens, though, is it gets shut down from a legal point of view: 'We didn't do anything wrong' or 'We don't want to discuss it anymore because it's too risky,' and then you hit a wall. And it's very hard for patients to move forward."

That inability to move forward is familiar to a health-care worker whose mother died of a hospital-borne COVID-19 infection in 2020.