Video shows death of US patient

[Admin]

Video footage emerges of a woman dying on the floor of a New York hospital as workers fail to help for more than an hour.

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[couldntgetaname]

Given that the most likely cause of such a thing is overcrowding and understaffing, this -

Six people have since been fired or suspended as a result of the incident, including security staff and members of the medical staff.

would seem to be a counterproductive reaction.

[Dr Noodle]

Ha good point. But there was an earlier line that said something about patients being abused and unnecessarily given mind altering drugs. Perhaps this was a 'big enough' excuse for the unions to allow those staff to be fired.

[laurajb]

I saw this online last night. There were two people in the waiting area. One being the patient in question.

Also a security guard who kept walking in and out it was disgraceful.

And to add insult to injury the other waiting patient only started complaining and shouting when the staff arrived. When the patient collapsed on the floor she just sat there and watched.

There is no excuse for leaving a patient on the floor!!!

Also what the hell were the cctv people doing. Sitting on their hands???

[couldntgetaname]

Playing devil's advocate here, but anyway.

Britain has PCSOs who would stand by and watch a child drown. That's what they're supposed and instructed to do. Lacking full training, there would be a lawsuit lodged within seconds of any botched rescue effort. In litigation-mad America, are non-clinical staff permitted to get involved? Or if they are, are there unofficial disincentives or directives from on high to limit exposure? If they are expected or instructed to stick to their own little world [be it watching for thieves or throwing out troublemakers or filling in forms] then that's what people usually do.

At 5:32 in the morning, is it common for that department to have drunks passed out on the floor? I'd hazard a guess that it is. If I'm not mistaken, that would be the local 'public' hospital, and would therefore have a big chunk of such patients. Stretched staff [the footage only shows one small waiting area, no treatment rooms or cubicles and no emergency entrance, but I doubt there's an emergency department in the world not stretched at that hour] are known to miss things - and they were most definitely stretched, given their *revised* target is a ten hour wait.

Don't get me wrong here - they definitely need to go with the 15 minute checks and reduced waiting times, but the scapegoating is a nono. The tone of the coverage seems to push blame away from a systems failure and onto the frontline staff. Management do that here in the HSE, they do it in the NHS, and they do it everywhere. It's their way.

As an aside, the hospital seems pretty cool.

[Singh.Simran]

There is a fair point in there somewhere, but not all the evidence is accurate. The PCSOs in question were lacking in knowledge about the situation (noone had bothered to tell them where the child was, whether she had been got out yet, or indeed anything) and i think couldn't actually swim. And of course, they don't have a duty to put their lives on the line. They aren't proper coppers.

I think ultimately there are mitigating factors but a death within a hospital without the vestiges of any effort towards helping is inexplicable.

[Varied A]

The incident with those PCSOs has been blown out of all proportion. If you look at the facts, you'll see they did exactly the right thing.

On being told of the incident, one went to get further help while the other assessed the scene. Some things to bear in mind:
1) there was no exact location for the child and so there was no focal point to search
2) the child had been in the water for a long time and was almost certainly dead before the PCSOs arrived
3) The water was murky and there was consequently zero visability, meaning that any rescue attempt without specialist equipment was both frought with dangers and unlikely to succeed 4) The remaining PCSO was on his own, and therefore had no backup if he came into difficulties.

If anybody else here has ever been involved with pre-hospital care or open-water rescue, or even has some basic first aid knowledge, you should know that to enter the water in these circumstances is sheer lunacy. It has nothing to do with PCSO or PC - either should have made exactly the same call.

As for this incident - like the poster above I can see how it happened, not that it particularly excuses it. This appears to be one room in a vast department which appears to be chronically overstretched. It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see how it could be overlooked for an hour or so, particularly with the other person in the room not raising the alarm. Next time any of you are doing a night in A&E, with drunks piling up in the cubicles, and a steady flow of people coming in via ambulance, take a minute to think when you last checked the waiting room.

This incident will doubtless have led to a bigger step up in waiting room checks, and it's unlikely that such an incident could happen again (although, isn't 15 minutes really too long if we actually want to save these people?), not that it's particularly likely to. I've been around the NHS for long enough to know that when a freak event like this happens, everybody is up in arms and huge time and resources go into preventing its occurence (usually by means of a complicated protocol and associated beurocracy). Meanwhile, because of this, real, honest to goodness problems occuring day in day out continue unabated because nobody has time or money to fix them

[Dr Noodle]

In the casualty I work in sometimes the admit area has glass windows and the seats are facing them. The admit area is always manned so there's no way something like that could happen there and not be noticed.

But at the casualty in my home town that I went to once years ago, the waiting area was half the size of the one at that place above and there was noone keeping an eye. Even at eight years old I was shocked by this. And it's the only hospital with an A+E department for thirty miles. Effing HSE.

[Mamba]

At the end of the day she was there because she wanted help. She died in their care. Very Sad. There is no excuse for a human to leave a woman lying on a floor for an hour. Enough people saw her and visibly decided to ignore her situation. Joe public could be judged lightly for the same inhumane act due to medical ignorance, but medical staff ? Im genuinly appaled.

[couldntgetaname]

Originally Posted by Varied A

The incident with those PCSOs has been blown out of all proportion. If you look at the facts, you'll see they did exactly the right thing.

Which, if you look, is what I said - I brought up the PCSO story to illustrate a failing in the "why did nobody save the world" reaction such stories alway invoke.