The former chief of staff at the hospital in Hearst told a coroner’s jury that he was angry and frustrated when he learned one of his patients had died before Ontario's air ambulance could take him to the intensive care unit in Sudbury.

Dr. Martin Papineau testified at the inquest into the deaths of five people in Constance Lake First Nation during an outbreak of a fungal lung disease in 2021 and 2022.

Papineau, an anaesthesiologist, said he was called to intubate Luke Moore on the afternoon of Nov 18, 2021, because Moore couldn’t breathe and needed to be transferred to the Sudbury hospital for more specialized care.

He was suspected to have blastomycosis, among the first to be identified in what turned out to be an emerging health crisis in the Cree community of 800 people.

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