That’s pretty much SOP in Hospitals.....
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