Yellowknife hospital calls frustrate RCMP

Yellowknife RCMP say they have dealt with 16 missing-person calls from the local hospital in the last six months, most which involved escaped psychiatric patients.

The latest two cases involved a 19-year-old patient who went missing from Stanton Territorial Hospital twice this week, but came back within a few hours, according to police.

RCMP say the Fort Smith, N.W.T., man, who was an involuntary patient at the hospital's psychiatric ward, was allowed outside — unescorted — to smoke a cigarette around 7:15 p.m. MT on Monday. Police were called two hours after the man failed to return.

Investigators searched around Yellowknife for the man, who ended up coming back to the hospital on his own around 10:30 p.m., Sgt. Brad Kaeding told CBC News.

The same man left the hospital grounds again on Wednesday night, Kaeding said. Like before, hospital staff reported him missing two hours after he did not return.

And like in Monday's case, the man returned about an hour after police began searching for him, Kaeding said.

Frequent occurrences

Police say the majority of missing-person calls from the hospital involve patients who are in care for mental health issues.

In most cases, the patients went missing after taking unsupervised smoke breaks, Kaeding said.

"It does seem to be rather a frequent occurrence," he said. "From our perspective, it does involve a lot of resources from the RCMP. It does affect our ability to respond to other calls."

Police say there have been some discussions with hospital officials on how they can better deal with monitoring patients.

"I'm not familiar with this happening anywhere else … definitely not with this frequency," Kaeding said.

"On the other hand, [the] Yellowknife hospital, as far as I'm told, doesn't necessarily have the proper facilities for dealing with situations like this. So that might be one of the root causes of the problem."