A Mother's Frustration With a Broken System
Tegan Hutz will tell anyone who asks that the nurses and doctors at IWK Health Centre in Halifax were exceptional. When her infant son landed in the ICU, the care he received was attentive, compassionate, and professional. What came after, though, left her rattled.
For more than two months, the medical records documenting her son's hospital stay — the charts, the treatment notes, the clinical history from some of the scariest days of her family's life — were simply gone.
"You trust the system with your child's health information, and then it disappears," Hutz said. "That's not okay."
What Happened to the Records?
The IWK Health Centre is a leading pediatric and women's health hospital serving Atlantic Canada, handling some of the most vulnerable patients in the region. The disappearance of records related to a NICU or ICU stay isn't just an administrative headache — it can have real downstream consequences for a child's ongoing care.
When a baby spends days in an ICU, that record becomes a critical reference point for every doctor, specialist, and family physician who sees that child going forward. Allergies, medications administered, procedures performed — all of it lives in those notes. A gap in that record isn't a minor inconvenience; it's a crack in the foundation of continuity of care.
Hutz's case has come to light amid a broader conversation in Nova Scotia about the province's "One Person, One Record" initiative — an ambitious effort to consolidate patient health information into a single, unified digital record accessible across the healthcare system. The goal is exactly what the name suggests: every Nova Scotian's health history in one place, eliminating the siloed, fragmented recordkeeping that has long plagued Canadian healthcare.
The Bigger Picture: Digital Health Records in Canada
Canada has been working toward integrated digital health records for years, but progress has been uneven across provinces. Nova Scotia's initiative is one of the more aggressive pushes in the country, but the Hutz case illustrates how much can still go wrong during the transition.
Health Minister Michelle Thompson has championed the "One Person, One Record" program as a cornerstone of modernizing Nova Scotia's healthcare infrastructure. But advocates for patients say that as systems migrate and consolidate, there need to be far stronger safeguards to ensure records don't fall through the cracks — especially for the most vulnerable patients.
For families like Hutz's, the stakes are personal and immediate. Her son is doing well now, and his records were eventually recovered. But the two-month gap left her wondering: what if something had come up during that window? What if a physician needed that ICU history in an emergency and couldn't access it?
What Families Can Do
Healthcare advocates recommend that parents of children who have had significant hospital stays request a full copy of the records directly — don't wait for the system to make them accessible. In Canada, patients have the right to access their own medical records under provincial privacy legislation, and getting a paper or digital copy at discharge is increasingly common practice.
For Hutz, the experience has made her a vocal advocate for better accountability in health data management. Her son is thriving. The system, she says, still has a lot of catching up to do.
Source: CBC News Nova Scotia
