Several nurses show gaps in their ability to assess the condition of patients, according to the president of their professional order, Luc Mathieu. He says he is all the more “concerned” as coroners recently reported this problem.
“Several nurses do not do or do the assessment of physical and mental condition [du patient] “Said Mr. Mathieu, President of the Order of Nurses of Quebec (OIIQ). “When you don’t do that in 2025, it is not a good practice. »»
Coroner Arnaud Samson expressed his “concerns” at the OIIQ following the death of a 44-year-old man at the Hôtel-Dieu de Lévis, in July 2024.
The emergency sorting nurse had measured the blood pressure from David Laplante (179/124), but had not taken care of “hypertensive emergency,” he said in his report published in February 2025.
The nurse had not judged this value “credible” and had not validated it by an alternative method, specifies the coroner.
The patient was redirect to a medical clinic with an appointment for the next day. He died in him a “brain hemorrhage preceded by high blood pressure”, concludes the coroner.
Another mediatized case: the death of Yvon brushed in November 2023. The 80-year-old man died of an abdominal aorta aneurysm at Anna-Laberge hospital in Châteauguay, after spending 11 hours in an emergency.
In his report, Coroner Jean Brochu writes that an emergency nurse should have made an assessment of the patient’s “level of consciousness”. He indicates that the reassessment period has not been respected. The urgency overflowed.
According to Luc Mathieu, the evaluation of the physical and mental condition of patients is a “weakness” observed during individual professional inspections or to the admission examinations of the order.
“This is why in the past year, the members of the Order Training Committee have developed a tool to promote the teaching of nursing clinical reasoning, nursing clinical judgment, which is the basis of the evaluation,” he said.
This tool, intended for college and university teaching houses as well as health establishments, will be disseminated this fall.
“We are in the process of developing continuous training on this,” adds the president of the OIIQ.
This training is addressed as much to nurses in sorting as well as those on the front line, in home care or in CHSLD, underlines Luc Mathieu.
He recalls that in the middle of accommodation, nurses often take care of users with significant neurocognitive disorders that affect behavior.
There are nurses who will not assess when [un usager] will shout or strike. They challenge the doctor to prescribe drugs, psychotropic drugs, to calm people, while if they were doing a good assessment, often they could realize that maybe there is underlying pain that has not been detected.
Luc Mathieu, President of the Order of Quebec Nurses
Instead of prescribing a drug, an intervention plan could be put in place, he notes.
With these training courses, the OIIQ says it wants to avoid “sentinel events”, that is to say incidents or accidents having had serious consequences or which could have had them, or which reveal flaws in a health establishment.
Last spring, hearings were held as part of a public inquiry into the death of Normand Meunier, a 66-year-old quadriplegic man, who asked for medical aid to die after developing bed wounds at the Saint-Jérôme hospital. The coroner report is being written.
