Posted on 07/01/2008 12:06:10 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 ...
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.
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.
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