Posted on 07/01/2008 12:08:22 PM PDT by Smogger
NEW YORK - Video from a surveillance camera at a Brooklyn hospital shows a woman dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency room while people nearby ignore her.
The video was released Monday by lawyers suing Kings County Hospital alleging neglect and abuse of mental health patients at the facility.
The video shows the 49-year-old woman keeling over and falling out of her chair on June 19 and lying facedown on the floor, then thrashing before going still. About an hour passed before someone realized what was happening and tried to help.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
An understatement from watching the video.
Poor woman.
This would be a good add for national health rationing.
Shades of NOLA/Katrina, where blacks waited to be rescued by the whites, and were damned pissed when they had to wait.
I don’t even know what to say.
You might be onto something there.
At least the staff knew how to react in case of a real emergency!!!
I can’t watch the video.
Kings County Hospital is a chamber of horrors. You NEVER want to end up there.
Without reading the article and without knowing anything about the place or the hospital I will make one guess: It is a Gov’t Hospital.
OK - now I will read the article to see if I wrong....
If you've ever been to an emergency room of any sort in a city, you realize a large number of people are there for the simplest excuses, such as a minor cut or a bruise, because they will get someone to eventually look at them—even if they have no money. This is why ERs must triage patients and the excessive use of ERs for colds and simple ailments is the major reason ER costs to those who pay have skyrocketed.
I would fully expect that in a “psychiatric” ER that a number of these people, many likely on drugs, alcohol, etc., fall asleep on the furniture and floors. Big deal. The floor offers more room to sleep.
I don't really see a problem with this like what is being painted in the report. Of course a lawyer will say ‘people go to ERs to live, not die’ and the ACLU will say ‘this violates “patient's rights”’ and all that bull. Where in the Constitution does it say I have a “right” to demand you give me attention when I want it? It doesn't say a thing that would make me think a doctor should do a thing for me.
I don't fault the security guy or the others for this issue much at all. However, the guy getting hit in traffic and then ignored by passersby in the snip of video attached to the report, does really bother me. There is no reason to believe an elderly man chose to sleep in the middle of a busy street.
A laughably racist comment that also happens to be patently false.
The first security guard, doctor, and nurse were all pretty clearly white. As if that makes any difference.
Very disturbing to say the least.
Do these employees not know that they are being taped? At any rate, every employee who ignored her should not just be fired, they should be charged with (I’m not sure what but don’t they have an obligation as professionals to do something?)
Just disgusting.
The amazing thing to me is that the ER didn’t look busy at all.
susie
>>The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the hospital, said six people have been fired as a result of the incident, including security personnel and members of the medical staff.<<
Until HHC’s president, Alan Aviles is fired I wouldn’t expect any changes.
They didn't sit on their asses like the people in the lounge.
They obviously notified medical personnel.
Why couldn't the tubs-of-lard sitting in the lounge have gone for help?
The staff seemed uncomfortable with her on the floor but acted like they didn't want to confront the issue. The nurse could have bent down to check her but she didn't kick her. Looks bad though.
So sad. So terribly sad. Shame on those people who noticed her lying there and did nothing. Cold, calloused people.
True story: a doctor friend of mine did her residency in emergency medicine at Kings County Hospital about 10 years ago. At some point she realized she was being stalked by a relative of a patient she had seen very briefly before the patient was admitted to the hospital where s/her subsequently died, and reported this to both hospital officials and police. A while later, she arrived home in the wee hours of a morning, and the guy was lying in wait for her and stabbed her. She survived and went back to work very quickly. Police knew the perp’s identity but never caught him — they advised her to move to a high security building (yeah right, in NYC, on a resident’s salary!). She asked the hospital to at least provide her with a security guard to escort her to her car when she was leaving the hospital after dark, but the hospital simply refused.
Young doctors are apparently expendable in this hospital’s view, and given the unconstitutional residency system, it’s not like she had the option to quit and go work somewhere else. But if some deadbeat drug addict passes out and dies on the ER floor while waiting for free “medical” care, it seems the hospital management gets all high and mighty and starts firing people. Our tax dollars at work . . .
She was in that room for 24 HOURS!!!! THAT is TORTURE! Poor soul....Pray for her.
They clearly DID NOT NOTIFY medical personnel, who were equally indifferent.
Why couldn't the tubs-of-lard sitting in the lounge have gone for help?
You mean the other mentally ill patients?
The tub of lard in the rent-a-cop costume saw her early on, and rolled back in on a chair for another look later. He evidently did nothing to help. Should I generalize and assume that all security personnel are like this?
Yeah. If anyone had seen her fall it would probably have been a different story.
New cost-cutting measures adopted from the Oregon state plan?
I don't recall anything mentioning she was a drug addict, and far from high and mighty the hospital looked to cover their asses by falsifying records first.
I walked into the emergency room at University of Michigan Hospital once with a piece of steel shoved through my guts and was hitting my hip bone.
When I limped up to the desk I very politely explained I had been in an accident and was wondering if they could see me.
There were two things I noticed immediately when she saw the problem - being polite gets you far better results than abrupt and the looks you get from the three dozen people that were there before you. If looks could kill I was dead a dozen times over.
Kitty Genovese, meet Terri Schiavo.
Another little known fact (to outsiders) is that the emergency room at Kings County is usually swamped with illegal immigrants who never pay a cent for their medical care.
With all the money they spend on public health in NY, you’d think they’d not have this problem.
Psychiatric care in this country is an evil joke.. the mentally ill are ignored and left to die or fend for themselves all over the country, it’s not much better than the old days of the “snake pit”.... most of the homeless in this country are mentally ill patients who are thrown out of places that have no room or not enough resources.. What happens to the mentally ill in this country is a national shame. And no one wants to talk about it or deal with it.
And I consider myself a hardcore conservative... I don’t much care for prisoner’s rights, and I think able bodied adults should take responsibility for their own health care, but the mentally ill don’t have a choice.
At this hospital, if she wasn’t, she was in a tiny minority. The root of the problem is that the government is maintaining (at huge cost) city hospitals to treat a non-paying patient population that is overwhelmingly dysfunctional, drug/alcohol addicted, and devoid of personal responsibility. At the same time, the hospital is subject to the huge raft of federal, state, and local laws preventing it from giving a swift kick in the rear to those who need that more than anything else, and from forcibly institutionalizing those who need THAT more than anything else.
The result is emergency rooms that are perpetually in a state of complete chaos, with many people falling asleep during long waits for care (as well as some homeless drug addicts coming in for the purpose of sleeping while pretending to wait for care), drug addicts and drunks passing out, and people dramatically faking symptoms of extreme pain in an attempt to convince doctors to write them prescriptions for addictive painkillers (either for their personal use, or for resale on the street). Not surprisingly, the staff becomes accustomed to this sort of scene, and has long since figured out they can’t do anything to change it. Inevitably, once in while, one of the many people who spends an hour or more unconscious on the floor or slumped over a chair will turn up dead.
Unreal - I was expecting this to be a repost of the incident from CA a few months back, but instead, yet another example of what socialized medicine could bring to us.
It happened in New York I can believe it. Someone will fry for this!
Doesn't bother me.
I was in NY last year and caught the mother of all stomach viruses. I felt fine one minute and the next I was hugging the throne. I literally heaved at least a hundred times over a period of about two hours. I was in a hotel room alone and by the time I realized I was in serious trouble I couldn’t even get out of the bed to get to the phone. I did, however, have my Blackberry. I sent a two-word message to a colleague in the hotel: NEED DOCTOR.
EMTs showed up and took me to a NY hospital ER, where they put me in a hospital gown, on a bed in a freezing room with no covers, and essentially left me for hours. Twas one of the most miserable nights of my life.
MM
When you open a hospital and serve the public, people have a right to expect that you will actually provide the services that you say you will. If they are not going to provide the service, they should close the place down. This has nothing to do with what services they SHOULD be providing and everything to do with the fact they they don’t seem to give a rats butt—in which case they should change professions.
susie
However, the fact that they wrote that she was walking around suggests that they knew they weren’t doing their jobs.
When I was a kid and we used the military hospitals, I discovered that the fastest way to get seen was to bleed on their floor! Boy, those places made me swear off socialized medicine forever!
They should never have released all of those people—it wasn’t fair to them, and frankly, from a public health POV it’s not good for the rest of us. I’m sure those places were bad, but it would seem to me that we could have done a better thing.
susie
Sometime in the 60 and 70’s my Dad told me that the Democrats said that it was cruel to keep the mentally ill locked up so they just released them from institutions. Now most of these people are homeless, mostly due to their mental illness and the fact that they never learned to live in the outside world.
I even had a professor of Phych. in 1988 who told the class about this, and said she sees her former clients at the Union Mission (soup kitchen) when she dove by it.
They just don’t want to pay to warehouse them is all. I don’t see that it is humane to let a sick person live on the street.
Amen to that! I object much less to my pocket being picked to help those who are not able to help themselves than to providing for those who are able but unwilling. But I prefer to be charitable by choice, not by force!
To be able to make a racist remark like that, you could not have been paying attention when you watched the video. The first security guard was white as snow, but he walked away and did nothing. A white doctor looked, walked away, and did nothing. The majority of the blacks I saw their were patients. I don’t think I would look for help from a mental patient be they black, white or any other color, but I would expect a security guard and especially a doctor to provide aide and not walk away.
In the future, watch more carefully and maybe you will be able to keep your deep seated hatred hidden longer next time. Then you might be able to live up to your screen name.
You're the one boiling over with hatred.
I worked in Kings County Hospital over thirty years ago. It was a frightening place then. I see it has not improved one bit. (And I thought having Son of Sam in G ward was scary.)
I agree with you. They were mental too, this means their minds were out there past the Planet Neptune. I doubt their was much they could do.
That stupid rent a cop should have done something! He is a looser! That is why he is not a real cop!
I too am willing to put money into something that I think is a worthwhile cause..although I don’t think simply throwing money at anything is a good idea... My main gripe is the way the mentally ill are dealt with in every step of their process..someone needs to look into mental health reform in this country and stop treating the mentally ill like our dirty little secret.
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