Posted on 01/17/2008 3:03:27 PM PST by bshomoic
Paraplegic man dumped in LA gutter sues hospital
Thu Jan 17, 2008 4:35pm EST
By Jill Serjeant
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A mentally ill paraplegic man filed a lawsuit on Thursday against a hospital that dumped him in a gutter on Los Angeles' "Skid Row" -- a case that highlighted the plight of the city's vast homeless population.
Gabino Olvera, 42, sued the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center for negligence and elder abuse after it discharged him in February 2007, took him across town in a van and left him in a soiled hospital gown without a wheelchair in the heart of the city's homeless area.
Witnesses who came to Olvera's aid said they saw him dragging himself on the ground with hospital papers and documents clenched in his teeth while the driver sat in her van and applied makeup before driving off.
The incident was captured by security cameras at a nearby homeless shelter.
Hernan Vera, a lawyer with Public Counsel, which helped bring the lawsuit on behalf on Olvera, called it "the most obscene and callous example of this practice that we have seen."
Hollywood Presbyterian did not return calls for comment on the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court that seeks unspecified damages.
The Olvera case was one of about 50 reported incidents in the past 12 months of sick, confused and homeless patients being left by ambulances in the 50-block area of downtown Los Angeles thought to have the highest concentration of homeless people in the United States.
Estimates of the number of homeless in the United States ranges from 500,000 to more than a million.
In Los Angeles, an estimated 12,000 people, many of them mentally ill or addicted to drugs and alcohol, live and sleep on the streets of the area known as Skid Row.
Vera called Los Angeles "ground zero in the fight against unlawful dumping of homeless patients by hospitals."
Lawyers for Olvera said one of the goals of the lawsuit was to force local hospitals to change their practices.
In May, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, the country's largest nonprofit health-care provider, settled a lawsuit involving the dumping of another patient by agreeing to find shelter places for all patients it discharges in Los Angeles.
Kaiser also agreed to improve discharge procedures and to contribute $500,000 to homeless services on Skid Row.
Hollywood Presbyterian said in a statement in May it would adopt similar protocols, but lawyers for Olvera said the hospital had failed to do so.
So is the hospital supposed to provide a free change of clothes, a paid hotel room, and a free wheelchair?
Anyone stopped to wonder why so many hospitals in California are shutting their doors?
What are these hospitals supposed to do with the homeless when they have to make room for the illegal aliens they’re supposed to take care of?
Oh, brother. Now, not only do hospitals have to provide free medical care to these people, they have to find them shelter afterwards.
Fine, you put up the leech then.
the first 5 posts are positively sick. wonder where it goes from here.
get back to us when it happens to your kids.
This is sad. I would think one of the Rescue Missions or churches in the area could have least put him up for awhile, but doesn’t sound like the hospital even tried to help him out by checking with those groups.
Yes. It’s called discharge planning. Social workers are supposed to make she he has somewhere to go, and if his wheelchair was “lost”, find a donnated one for him.
Who are “these`people?”
Oh, great. So I guess the hospitals can count on you to put these people up with free room and board?
I'm sure they'll be happy to taxi them out in your direction. What's your address?
[Crickets Chirping]
Preview of National Health Care????
Not to be callous, but "elder abuse"? He's 42 years old.
This person is mentally ill and a paraplegic.
What would YOU like us to do with the ill and suffering?
Sheesh!
I have to agree. They took him to where he normally lives apparently. They were not responsible to give him a wheel chair and I would presume he did not come with one. People generally leave the hospital in their own clothing.
I guess the worker should have put him out on the sidewalk not in the street? As for her touching up her make up, well hard to believe any women I know would choose skidrow to do that, but she did so at her own risk.
Let's get a list of the kind hearted souls who are outraged by what this hospital did, including their home addresses, so the hospital will know where to send them next time.
No need for that. What they should have done was discharged him to a homeless shelter. This guy wasn’t a druggie or loser, he was a quadraplegic! If you were a quadraplegic and had no family or insurance to support you would you think this was proper treatment?
“Yeah over there between the dumpster and the crack shack, that would be a great place to drag and wriggle around in, drop me there”
right on.
There must be some middle ground between keeping him in the hospital for an indefinite time and dumping him in the street. This is what social services are for.
The guy is a mentally ill paraplegic — he needs help. Dumping a man like this in the street is unChristian.
Seems that this is not far from when many diseased people during the Dark Ages were left in the gutters to rot and die, and spread disease. You would think by now we could have a better solution even if these people are difficult to convince.
No, I don't think that we the taxpayers or hospitals have to provide everything, but he must have come in the hospital with clothes, what happened to those? Unless, they were so soiled and covered with bugs, etc. that they had to get rid of them. Often homeless people who are taken into the hospital have clothes, socks, shoes that are stuck on them and loaded with "critters." In which case any church, Goodwill center, etc. could have at least provided clothing. However, to me it just seems there must be more to this story than meets the eye, than that they simply dumped this guy without trying anything.
Did he not have clothes and a wheelchair when he entered the hospital?
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