A White Rock man has some questions about the supervision of mental-health patients at Peace Arch Hospital, after one of those patients showed up unexpectedly in his living room.
Gary D’Haese said he was in the front yard of his Thrift Avenue home Sept. 21, when his wife emerged from inside with a stranger “following like a puppy” behind her.
The young man had wandered into the couple’s home shortly after 7 p.m., as D’Haese’s wife was composing an email and his two young daughters were playing in a back room.
The patient – who a Fraser Health official has confirmed had been given a short-term pass to leave the hospital – had apparently cut through the yard of D’Haese’s Goggs Avenue neighbour, hopped a fence and entered the home through an unlocked side door.
Thankfully, the intruder, who told D’Haese he was sedated, made no attempt to cause the family harm – to reach D’Haese’s wife, he had to walk through the kitchen and past a fully stocked knife block.
D’Haese said his wife only realized the noises she’d been hearing weren’t being made by her husband when the intruder asked about a man named Dave, and if he could stay there.
D’Haese wants to know why he – or any mental-health patient, for that matter – was left unsupervised.
Citing confidentiality, Fraser Health spokesman Roy Thorpe-Dorward said he could not discuss specifics of the patient involved, but did say that patients who are in the hospital voluntarily, depending on their assessed level of need, are just as free to come and go as any other patient.
“The goal, always, with patients is to create the least restrictive environment that is deemed to be safe and appropriate,” he said.
A patient who violates the restrictions of a temporary pass would be reassessed to determine if a higher level of observation is needed, he added.
Thorpe-Dorward noted that while it is common for someone who is dealing with mental-health issues to be medicated, “somebody who is on medication that in anyway made it unsafe for them to leave the hospital wouldn’t be given a pass.”
While D’Haese is thankful the incident ended quickly and without injury, he questioned the hospital’s liability in such cases, particularly if they end in the patient harming themselves or someone else.
“Does the hospital not understand that they are responsible for the patients in their care?” he said in an email to Peace Arch News.
“If a patient is harmed or harms someone, the hospital is open to a lawsuit.”
D’Haese, who works as a peace officer for the City of Burnaby, said the man who entered his home Sept. 21 apologized several times, showed him his hospital bracelets and stated that he was from the psychiatric ward and still sedated.
D’Haese kept him in the yard until police arrived and returned him to the hospital.
White Rock RCMP confirmed that officers were called to the scene. The intruder was returned to the hospital.
Thorpe-Dorward said Fraser Health is not investigating the incident.