Posted on 07/03/2014 12:43:07 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veterans Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance, officials confirmed Thursday.
Officials at the hospital said it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk.
VA spokeswoman Sonja Brown said Kirtland Air Force Medical Group personnel performed CPR until the ambulance arrived.
She says staff followed policy in calling 911 when the man collapsed on Monday. "Our policy is under expedited review," Brown said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
That’s not important. How are their solar panels working?
That’s pretty much SOP in Hospitals.....
We sound more like the 3rd world every day.
CommunistCare..isn’t it grand..just grand
If that was an illegal there would be immediate attention. This country is getting creepier by the minute!
Where's my bonus check?
the democrats’ war on old white people continues.
oprah let it slip. whitehouse never rebuked her on it.
I’ll betcha if that were Bergdahl or some other traitor to America, an ambulance would’ve been there in a flash.
In government run hospitals but not in private hospitals. My wife used to work at a private hospital and when they called a code it could be anywhere in the hospital including the attached doctor’s office and cafeteria.
In this case this doesn’t appear to be a VA system failure at first glance. I am more concerned about why it took 30 minutes for a 911 ambulance to be dispatched—or did they mean to say ‘respond’?
There’s not much info in the article, but 500 yards away (that’s 5 football fields) in another building definitely justifies calling 911. Getting equipment other than an AED to a patient in a cafeteria would be chaotic. Transporting the patient and equipment through corridors, possibly outside between buildings even worse, especially with CPR in progress. In this case the call to 911 was appropriate. The problem was 911 response time. I wonder if there was confusion over whether this was a 911 call or a transfer(non-urgent) call. Some ambulance services handle both, and true 911 calls from hospitals are rare. There’s also the possibility that in the confusion 911 wasn’t called right away. When you are in a hospital setting it is easy to forget that step because it is unusual. That would be more of a ‘human error’ failure which should be addressed by re-training all personnel, but wouldn’t necessarily indicate a systemic failure as do many of the other VA incidents.
O2
My Dad was treated at that hospital for the last 30 years of his life. He just died, recently, one month short of his 90th birthday.
Most of those years he drove himself to his doctor when the need manifested. The last couple of years his offspring took him.
The only delay we ever saw in his treatment was a couple of hours in the emergency room a couple times when we drove him to the hospital. That is the same delay we experienced in ERs in civilian hospitals with my mother-in-law.
My Dad needed 2 knee replacements that the VA never got around to for about 15 years. That was my Dad. His VA knee replacer called him dozens of times to get the job done. My Dad kept putting him off. My Dad, a Navy Pharmacists Mate (Corpsman/Medic) who invaded Iwo Jima, told me the convalescence scared him to death.
It seems to me that vets would all be better served if we were to take government secretaries in charge of the VA and hospital administrators in those VA hospitals that murdered vets and throw them in prison.
Then, the congress should invite the guys who run the VA hospital in Minneapolis to testify and tell them how the job is done.
Not true....I've never worked in a gov. hospital....
My dad was a WWII Marine in the Pacific.....died at the age of 64. Lung cancer....never darkened a VA hospital's door. Didn't have to...
Like everything else the Obama Administration touches, it has been ruined
Every gov’t employee has the same response when something goes wrong, “We followed policy”. If you are a person that can think and act quickly and have any common sense, gov’t work is not for you.
That’s the spirit! This is a success story by government health care standards. Think of the money they saved.
oprah let it slip. whitehouse never rebuked her on it.
Do you have link on that , my wife has some AAUW co-members who think both Oprah and the Mahdi are the two greatest people to walk among us. This would be a great item to induce some exploding liberal skulls.
All hospitals are in decline since government’s heavy hand has been on them for decades. Ted Kennedy (who has been sober for some time now) used to speak about the lib plan to screw up the health care system so much with regulations, etc. that eventually people would turn to single payer as a solution.
Everything government touches turns to crap. The bureacracy is going to completely ruin health care in the US.
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