Posted on 07/04/2008 7:09:08 AM PDT by Zakeet
To people around the world who have seen the video, Esmin Green is a symbol of a health-care system that seems to have failed horribly.
Green, 49, is shown rolling off a waiting room chair at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, on June 19. She lands face-down on the floor, convulsing.
Surveillance video captures her lying on the floor for more than an hour as several hospital workers see her and appear to ignore her. She died there.
But to fellow members of her church, she was known as "Sister Green." Together, they served as a family for her in the decade after she left Jamaica for New York.
Green left six children in Jamaica -- the youngest now 14. She had been sending money home.
[Snip]
Green was involuntarily admitted to the hospital's psychiatric emergency department June 18 for "agitation and psychosis."
Friend Peter Pilgrim says he saw Green a few days before her death. He says she was struggling with losing her job at a day care center and had been forced to move out of her apartment.
[Snip]
Her collapse came at 5:32 a.m. June 19, the NYCLU said, and she stopped moving at 6:07 a.m. During that time, according to the organization, workers at the hospital ignored her.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
When communists try pushing this type of tyranny down our throats, whether it is through Hillary's dried out, shrieking feminist wails or Obama’s practiced and phony thoughtful pauses, it is time to hate the ideology and the agenda and to condemn it openly, defiantly.
I’m thinking these types of deaths would only increase under socialized medicine as everyone I know who lives under such a system has incredibly long waits for anything - emergencies included.
i can hardly believe this, it is just awful and the family should sue the heck out of that hospital.
Having said that, Obama’s health care would make scenes like this more common. he wants to give free health care to all illegals..we don’t have enough doctors or facillities even if it did pass.
???
Do you die suddenly of a “psychic emergency”? I think this poor woman was in the wrong kind of hospital but that is no reason for this kind of neglect.
Any hospital or medical center licensed to dispense medicine of any kind, including psychiatric, has to have some medical training. Doctors and nurses ignored a dead woman on the floor. I’m not medically licensed for anything and I would have at least tried something. Or checked her out!
Hussein will solve this type of problem. We will all achieve eternal life ‘Wright’ here on earth.
???
What’s the sense in having surveillance cameras if no one responded?
Good question!
As soon as I saw it was a psych torture facility I said to myself, “Too bad there aren’t more cameras in more of these places.”
Scroll down past the euthenasia threads.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/socializedmedicine/index?tab=articles
Come on Stuart. You’ve been on FR long enough to understand AEMILIUS PAULUS’ post!
This is so sad. I can’t believe the other lady is just sitting there calmly (in fact, she appears to be watching the TV on the wall over the dead woman’s head). But maybe she tried to get help and nobody cared.
Kings County has always been a dreadful hospital, but this really takes it to a new level of awful. The poor woman who died probably should have been hospitalized in a psychiatric institution long before - she had had on-again, off-again mental problems and was brought to the hospital after a 911 call by a friend. This is horrible treatment for anybody, but I think in a lot of ways, it also relates to the horrible treatment of the mentally ill in the age of “deinstitutionalization.”
This is positively Third World.
The ‘key’ to all this is (apparently) quite obvious.
The article states she was admitted to the Psych unit in Jun.
You can guarantee EVERYONE (probably) thought she was ‘acting out’ again.
NOT AN EXCUSE, just an observation and those that ignored her for that amount of time should really find another line of work, then again with all the ‘freebies’ that frequent ER’s these days I imagine the place was a veritable ‘zoo’.
I still can’t figure out what #2 meant.
??? also may mean that I think it was a pretty sophomoric thing to say.
I feel for the friend.
It’s happened to me, you call 911 for help and instead the person gets abused. Then you feel horribly guilty.
Of course not. I wont go into all the things Ive recently seen but I do believe that there is something happening that MDs either genuinely dont have an answer for due to the limits of human knowledge or arent willing to risk their license to attempt to treat due to CDC guidelines, lawsuits, etc. Whatever it is it often effects many systems and as standard tests dont show anything it is eventually written off as depression or some type of somataform disorder but then doesnt respond to that treatment either. By the time a patient reaches this point they are so disgusted with the system that the person just struggles along until the patients health takes a bad enough turn for the worse that doctors are willing to take the whole thing more seriously...
OMG
“... the family should sue ..”
The NY Civil LIberties Union probably has the complaint already drawn up. She will not have died in vain.
You are likely correct. I have no idea what happened to this woman but as I just mentioned to Ditter, Ive recently seen a couple of instances where someone suddenly developed a "mental health" issue only to shortly thereafter have to be dragged back from the edge of death. I cant help but to wonder if there isnt something new or previously rare and unrecognized but growing happening.
I agree, I think there are diseases and conditions out there that are so rare that they are not discovered until it is too late.
Don't illegals already get free health care? Well, we pay for it out right or through our insurance companies, but for the illegals it is free.
question... with an EMPTY waiting room, why wasn't she looked at???
Maybe the staff was watching the latest Scrubs marathon..............
It resembled “The Night of the Living Dead”. Unfortunately this was not an isolated incident. There are too many hospitals in the City of NY where this could have happened. Most of the city is now a 3rd world country.
I hope her children end up well-provided for. This is what lawyers are for.
Nonsense.
A "system" failure? Please!
More like a failure of the few people working there IN A HIGHLY REGULATED NEW YORK STATE HOSPITAL SYSTEM.
It could have happened anywhere that had stupid, inattentive workers, but it DID happen in a hospital in one of the most heavily regulated places in the country.
That would draw me away. Scrubs is great!
Kings County Hospital Center is a 627 bed hospital, one of many facilities operated by the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation.
It was the site of the first open-heart surgery performed in New York State. Kings County physicians invented the world's first hemodialysis machine, conducted the first studies of HIV infection in women, and produced the first human images using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Kings County was the first Level 1 Trauma Center in the U.S.
True. And the place is still a dump.
At night the hospital workers are the worst of the worst and the laziest of the laziest. She probably would have been ok if the day shift was on. They seem to have no human kindness in them.
I hate to interrupt this righteous anger, except to point out that the only thing different from this and other public mental hospitals is that the woman died, and it was on tape. This is not to say that her care wasn’t awful, it was, but similar things are happening all over the country, right now.
I don’t encourage people to ever visit a mental hospital if they can possibly avoid doing so. Because there you WILL see people laying on the floor for hours, and staggering around in a daze either natural or drug induced. And they are the lucky ones. Many are in near coma states in bed almost all day.
They are the worst of the worst as far as mental illness goes, and even people who can barely function are released often to fend for themselves. For even if they have family, their family can no longer support them with their illness—it is just too difficult.
Typically, when a woman like this is picked up by the police, or arrives in an emergency room, they are given to the County hospital for two weeks. In those circumstances, you will find that most people are near normal, and only a tiny minority receive long term care.
She obviously had a serious illness above and beyond her mental problems, that was *concealed* by her mental problems. Nobody reacted to her collapse, because they just assumed she wanted to lie down there.
Nobody did anything, because they have seen it before, most likely on a daily basis. They only pay attention when it looks like a patient is trying to harm themselves or harm others—mostly by being a pest.
As a final note, something that people find hard to understand is when a mentally ill person *seems* to understand what you are saying, but “the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”
You desperately want to communicate with them, but you can’t, even though they seem to be aware and attentive. You want to share the human bond with them, but you can’t. For most people, this results in deep frustration and even some degree of anger at the mentally ill person.
If you are around people like that all day, it is very easy to dehumanize them to some degree, even if you are conscientious. Because no matter how caring, or sympathetic you are, you cannot connect.
Yes, you should feel sorry for her, but be aware that there are right now, thousands like her all over the country.
i guess theres a lot to be said for living in a small town with a small town hospital... that would be impossible here.
Is your opinion based on personal experience?
Is it the staff? The location? What makes it a dump? Please tell more.
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