A decade has passed since Brian Sinclair died while waiting for care in a Winnipeg emergency room.

An inquest ruled his death could have been prevented and made 63 recommendations.

Sinclair died Sept. 21, 2008 after spending 34 hours in the Health Sciences Centre ER waiting room.

Cousin Robert Sinclair described Brian as an independent person who loved life like everyone else.

He said it’s sad to know not a lot can be done to change what happened to Brian. If anything comes of his cousin’s death, Robert hopes it’s preventing discrimination and stopping others from making bad assumptions about people.

“We wanted the legacy of Brian to be better health care,” said Robert. “Not the way it was when he passed.”

Vilko Zbogar, a Toronto-based lawyer for Sinclair's family, said the death was caused in part by cultural stereotyping.

"For Brian Sinclair, his death was a failure of human compassion and empathy and then care,” said Zbogar.

The 45-year-old man who had lost his legs to frostbite went to hospital to have a blocked catheter changed.

The inquest determined Sinclair was never assessed when he arrived and that assumptions were made that he was homeless, drunk and waiting for a hospital bed.

If his catheter had been changed in a timely manner, the inquest found Sinclair likely would've survived.

"That ties back to the way he was perceived, as somebody who wasn't in need of care because of the way he looked,” said Zbogar. “And that was, in his case, a fatal assumption."

Sinclair has been described as a happy, family-focused man who volunteered in the community.

"He was courageous, he was helpful,” said Zbogar. “He, in his youth, as a young man, rescued two elderly people from a burning building and that's the kind of person he was."

The man remembered for how he helped others died when the help he needed never arrived.

A Manitoba government spokesperson said 55 of 63 recommendations made in the inquest have been completed with most of the others in progress.

Zbogar said most of the recommendations in the inquest were regarding hospital operations.

“There was actually relatively little that dealt with what we thought were the critical issues, the cultural stereotyping types of issues,” he said.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said it has made improvements over the past decade including mandatory cultural training for staff.

The WRHA acknowledged there's still more work to be done.

"Part of that is ensuring that all the staff have the tools and the understanding to provide that care in a culturally safe way,” said Krista Williams, chief health operations officer for the WRHA. “What happened to Mr. Sinclair is tragic. We are doing everything possible to address the gaps that happened to Mr. Sinclair so that other people don’t have to also face those similar situations.”