Dead girl's mother rips doctors' care

By DICK CHAPMAN, TORONTO SUN Seven months before young Lisa Shore died at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children a doctor dismissed her rare medical condition as "psychiatric," her mom said yesterday.

Sharon Shore, who is to testify today at the inquest into her 10-year-old daughter's 1998 death, said outside coroner's court there is "a very distinct probability" doctors' previous attitudes about Lisa set the tone for substandard nursing care.

Earlier in the inquest, the jury heard that nurses on the orthopedic ward at first questioned whether they should accept Lisa as a patient.

Lisa died just after 7 a.m. on Oct. 22, 1998. She'd been admitted to the orthopedic ward at 1:45 a.m. after being treated in Sick Kids' emergency department.

Her mom was commenting after another day of testimony by nurses that their monitoring of Lisa was not adequate, did not follow a pain specialist's instructions in the hospital computer and did not even meet requirements in the hospital's routine protocols.

Nurse Anagail Soriano testified she didn't even realize Lisa was on three other drugs that could affect the way she reacted to morphine she got at Sick Kids.

Soriano appeared to exasperate lawyers, coroner Dr. Jim Cairns and jury members with murky answers throughout the day. Some questions had to be repeated two or three times to get simple, yes-or-no answers.

Soriano, who had graduated from nursing school five months earlier, also testified that five patients per nurse was the hospital's prescribed limit. But for more than two hours, she had to care for Lisa and eight other patients.

Hospital lawyer Patrick Hawkins said outside the inquest he will be presenting evidence about the nursing workload issue.