Their heads bowed, Leon Swanson and David Tait Jr. of the Norway House Cree Nation could barely get their words out through the tears.
“Forty years gone is just … I don’t know,” Tait said at a press conference last summer. “Distraught. Confused. Angry .… I want answers. I want answers so bad.”
The two men, best friends born days apart in 1975 at the federally run Norway House Indian Hospital in Manitoba, had just discovered they had been switched at birth.
Less than a year earlier, another pair born in 1975 at the same hospital, Luke Monias and Norman Barkman of the Garden Hill First Nation, had gone public after DNA tests confirmed they, too, had been sent home with the wrong mothers.
Since those revelations, Ottawa has been unable to explain how the mistakes occurred. But more than 200 pages of government records the National Post obtained from Library and Archives Canada show the remote facility was in such disarray that year, Ottawa was being urged to scale back the services provided or shut it down.
According to the records, the building’s design was outdated and a potential firetrap; the annual turnover rate of doctors and nurses was almost 100 per cent; the hospital saw an unusually high number of childbirth complications; and there was “widespread lack of confidence” among locals over the treatment provided.
In a 1975 survey, residents living near the hospital in northern Manitoba were asked where they would prefer to be treated if they fell sick. More than half responded: somewhere else.
“They don’t have qualified personnel. I’d try to get to Winnipeg,” one young man said. “They send rookies up here.”
Eric Robinson, Manitoba’s former aboriginal affairs minister, who has been campaigning on behalf of the four men switched at birth and is scheduled to meet Wednesday with Health Canada officials, said he hopes the Post’s findings will spur Health Minister Jane Philpott to get to the bottom of how these mix-ups occurred.
I feel they’ve been trying to sweep this under the carpet. This issue is going to linger.
“I feel they’ve been trying to sweep this under the carpet. This issue is going to linger. They’ve got to put a team together to investigate this,” he said.
“The minister’s office in my view has been rather cavalier in its attitude to these four victims… They’re going through personal turmoil.”
In a statement, Health Canada said it is “working to engage the services of an independent third party to do a dedicated and thorough review of all available hospital records from that time period.”
It added the government is “aware that there were some issues at Norway House Hospital in the 1970s,” which led Ottawa to contract the University of Manitoba’s Northern Medical Unit to provide health care services in 1976.
“The department continues to search for the records that would provide further details.”
The Norway House hospital was one of almost two dozen “Indian hospitals” built after the Second World War.
Maureen Lux, a Brock University history professor and author of the recent book, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, says the push to create a segregated health care system for indigenous people was driven by a desire to control the “overblown” threat of tuberculosis in First Nations’ communities and prevent non-aboriginals from having to share their modern community hospitals.
The premise was the Indian hospitals would operate at half the cost of community hospitals, Lux said. “They were constantly short-staffed, always cutting corners. The point was to do this inexpensively.”
The Norway House hospital was built in 1952 on a decommissioned military base surrounded by marshland. The two-storey wooden structure served a region so impoverished it was called a “wilderness ghetto” in some government records.
By 1975, records show, the 38-bed hospital had a litany of problems. Many residents said they would prefer going to hospitals in Winnipeg or Thompson, Man. — which in those days typically meant boarding a cramped Twin Otter plane.
One government memo noted it had been recognized for some time that Norway House hospital was “obsolete in design and deteriorating physically.”
Another memo praised hospital staff for having fire extinguishers readily available and for ensuring “general awareness among the staff of fire danger.”
Multiple reports highlighted “chronic understaffing” of doctors and nurses. “At present, there are no Canadian-trained doctors; all were trained in Britain,” one report said.
Another evaluator wrote that the “absence of senior nursing staff and the severe shortage of registered nurses made the evaluation of nursing care impossible.”
One report cited high rates of infant mortality and obstetrical complications. While some attributed this to poor prenatal care, others put the blame on staff incompetence.
Quite frequently an incident was related in which a child who had been sent home was brought back to hospital the next day seriously ill, and died later on that day
“Quite frequently an incident was related in which a child who had been sent home was brought back to hospital the next day seriously ill, and died later on that day,” according to the survey of residents.
In every community surveyed, residents complained babies were discharged with diaper rashes, which was often attributed to nursing aides who “had the reputation of neglecting to carry out instructions.”
The Post has not yet been able to locate anyone who worked at the hospital in 1975, but did find a few doctors who were employed there in its earlier years. All said they did the best they could under difficult circumstances.
Dr. Murray Trusler, whose career began at Norway House in 1967-68, says he and one other doctor delivered an average of one baby a day over the course of a year, with the support of a small obstetrical staff.
But it boggles his mind how two sets of babies could be switched at birth, Trusler said. Back then, ankle bracelets with lettered beads spelling out the mother’s name were attached to each baby.
Hospital aides hired from the community did excellent work, but high rates of illiteracy and language barriers between locals and medical staff may have contributed to a mix-up, he said.
According to Trusler, staff were provided “meagre” medical supplies that were left over from the Second World War. On one occasion, he had to deliver a baby using a flashlight because the power had gone out .
His experience in Norway House, he said, “set me up for the rest of my life in terms of realizing that some things in medicine you have to problem solve. There are emergency situations where you have to rely on your own ability.”
Personally I was somewhat annoyed to see grown men weeping over an error 42 years ago. I assume they were raised in caring families.
Dr. Stu Eberhard, who worked at the hospital in 1969-70, said in an email the medical team was forced to rely on “1950s technology in 1970 with very little support from the feds, the province or the Indian bands.
“We did the best we could but were mostly functioning ‘from the seat of our pants.’ I must say we did surprisingly well, learned a lot and the local population got very good care.”
Babies, he said, were typically handed to a nurse who, in turn, assigned a nurse’s aide to care for the mother and her baby until they were ready to return home.
“I suppose the card on the bassinets could have been mixed up by the nursing aides … if many babies were delivered on the same day, confusion might have been present,” he said.
“Personally I was somewhat annoyed to see grown men weeping over an error 42 years ago. I assume they were raised in caring families.”
Even though consultants advised the government to close the Norway Houaw hospital, it remains open, though its capacity has been severely reduced; there are now only six inpatient beds.
Ottawa operates only one other facility, Percy E. Moore Hospital (formerly Fisher River Indian Hospital) in Hodgson, Man.
After the second Norway House mixup case, Health Canada offered free DNA testing to anyone born at the hospital in the mid-1970s. The agency won’t say if anyone has taken up the offer, citing privacy.
Lux said it would not surprise her if there were more cases exist.
Robinson says the four men have retained a lawyer.
• Email: dquan@postmedia.com | Twitter: dougquan
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