Above is a screenshot of the call I made to St. Paul’s yesterday morning.
(See below)
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December 9, 2025
Dr. Francis Maza
Vice President, Mission, Ethics & Spirituality
St. Paul’s Hospital
1081 Burrard Street
Dear Dr. Maza,
I am writing as a patient of St. Paul’s and a person who stutters, to communicate an alarming experience I had on the phone with St. Paul’s staff, and to request your support in remedying this issue moving forward.
Yesterday, I received a voicemail by a woman on behalf of Dr. Hull, asking me to call to arrange for an appointment. Because I am non-verbal over the phone and live on Gabriola Island, I wanted to arrange for a video chat which is what I do when I have an appointment with Dr. Dorscheid, my asthma doctor also based at St. Paul’s.
I use the Telus Referral Service to make my calls, which enables me to communicate with people who call me with the help of an intermediary. I log into the service online, and I get an assistance operator; my operator yesterday was Nicholas. He reads my message that tells him who I want to call and what I want to ask and/or say. He called the number left in the message: 604-806-8832.
As Nicholas was explaining the Referral Service to the person who answered, the person hung up. Nicholas tried a second time, and again, the person hung up. I have a transcript of the call, which I’ve attached to this email.
On your hospital website, you have a page with a section entitled: “Mission-driven, committed to all who live in BC.” Beneath that heading is this sentence: “Putting in place the right people and plans to address equity, diversity and inclusion issues.” In spite of your stated intent at the hospital, your staff failed me yesterday.
I cannot use a phone. However, I can speak well enough to get my thoughts and questions expressed when I use a video chat service, when I can see the person to whom I am talking. As I said above, I use it to communicate with my asthma doctor, but when I managed, with help, to contact the person who left the message on my answering machine on Monday, she said a video chat was not available for me to talk with Dr. Hull. I will, therefore, require a friend here with me when he calls to help me communicate with the doctor.
St. Paul’s should be more accessible to people with speech disabilities to be true to your mission statement. I am a board member of a disability advocacy organization called SPACE that is based in Vancouver. SPACE runs accessibility workshops to agencies and corporations to provide guidance on serving those with communication disabled people. Were you to sensitize your institution to the challenges stutterers and non-verbal people experience with your staff, it would make your mission statement something I could believe in and firmly get behind. SPACE can help you do that. To visit our website go to www.spacetostutter.org.
I look forward to your reply and hope that it includes an invitation to bring a Listening/ Communication Accessibility Workshop to St. Paul’s.
To arrange for a workshop, contact Aidan Sank at (address removed).
Sincerely
Chris Loranger
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As a result of this experience, I suggested to Aidan that SPACE have a “Complaint Department” so people like me who have experiences like I did yesterday, can inform SPACE and we can follow up as we did today with St. Paul’s. This is advocacy in action, calling out places that claim to be accessible, but aren’t.
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Her Highness and I walked twice yesterday, and the rest of the day was spent on fallout from my experience with St. Paul’s. I was blind angry. But the evening was relaxing and cozy. It was just what I needed. I watched Superman. I was trying to capture the joy I felt attending a movie with epic effects and scenery when I was a child. It didn’t work. The movie is stupid, but I could look at David Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult all day every day.
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