Donna Jones' death in a busy hospital emergency department was a deplorable and undignified way to die after she lost her battle against cancer, says her husband.

Donna, 66, knew the end was near and she wished to die at home. Instead, she died in what David says was a noisy, cold and impersonal Hamilton emergency room.

She ended up there after her home-care nurse — unequipped to deal with her impending death — saw Donna's critical condition at their Ancaster home and told David, "the only thing you can do is call an ambulance."

In that moment, he did not think to do otherwise.

"I was trusting the people looking after Donna."

Dr. Joshua Shadd, palliative care physician at St. Peter's Hospital and an assistant professor in palliative care at McMaster University, says the Jones case illustrates how ill-equipped the system is to help people in the last stages of life, in hospitals and the community alike.

"Across the health-care system, we need to get better at being flexible and adaptable to providing a high level of care to dying patients wherever they are."

Donna's ER death on April 8 was so shattering, it has taken David this long to find his voice to speak out. It was raised this week in the Ontario legislature by local NDP politicians.

David wants people to know about it in hopes of effecting change so critically ill patients in desperate need of compassionate care won't suffer in crowded ER hallways.

Donna lay dyingin the ER hallway at St. Joseph's Hospital for several hours. She was finally moved into a small private ER room, but died within a short time of being placed there, says David.

"With someone in her condition having to be a hallway any length of time at all was very upsetting for me," he says. "To see your wife die in emergency is not a very pleasant experience."

St. Joseph's Hospital chief of emergency medicine Dr. Greg Rutledge said Donna's death came relatively quickly, so there wasn't time to find a hospital bed upstairs.

The hospital did everything it could to make the best of the situation and eventually put Donna in a private ER room, he said.

"She wasn't on display. It was a private area for them, a room that had a door that could be closed."

David had expected that upon arriving at hospital, Donna would have been given a room. Although ER staff appeared to be doing their best to find one, it didn't happen.

In the ER, "there was a lot of commotion, a lot of activity. It just didn't seem right that someone who is dying should die that way."

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath raised the Jones case at Queen's Park Tuesday along with fellow Hamilton New Democrat MPP Sandy Shaw.

They said the way Donna died is a symptom of a health-care system in crisis, with ER overcrowding and patients having to linger in hallways while awaiting hospital beds.

Horwath said Donna was "left languishing on a bed" in the ER hallway where her final moments with her husband were spent "with no privacy and without the dignity they deserved."

The Hamilton Centre MPP said David's heartbreaking story comes at a time when hospitals are routinely overcrowded and housing patients in waiting rooms and hospital hallways.

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Rutledge said the government has funded 43 beds at St. Joe's to deal with ER overcrowding and added the hospital does not practise hallway medicine.

The hospital has a palliative care team, but it does not deal with emergency room patients, he said.

Shadd, the palliative care expert, said there is a need for more funding and better palliative education in hospitals, the community and long-term-care facilities.

The case also illustrates the home-care system doesn't have the capacity to provide around-the-clock good palliative care on short-term notice, he added.

It's hard to know what was going on in the home care nurse's mind that day, but Shadd said:

"A lack of palliative care education too often contributes to advice like 'call an ambulance' when it's not what the family wants at that moment." And the hospital ER is not the place to be, he added.

Horwath blames "an overloaded hospital system" and funding cuts in health care for the Jones' ordeal and says the problem is only getting worse under Premier Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government.

Ford announced on Oct. 3 that the province is "moving forward" with building 6,000 new long-term care beds to free up elder-occupied hospital beds, and is creating 640 "new beds and spaces" for the flu season.

Horwath, however, said funding cuts have been made to several health programs that take pressure off hospitals. These include cutting $330 million from mental health and addictions programs and cuts to what is normally the yearly hospital bed funding to handle an influx in patients during flu season.

"We have stories of people who are there (in the ER) for days on end, with no dignity, no quiet, no peacefulness."

As for palliative care, she says there's little government support, adding "it's another thing that would take the pressure off hospitals" so cases like Donna's ER death can be avoided.

Horwath says it's inhumane what David and Donna were put through.