Firings and Dismay After Woman's Death at Hospital
By Robin Shulman
Wa****ngton Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008; A07
NEW YORK, July 2 -- It was a nightmare captured on surveillance video.
A woman who had waited nearly 24 hours to be seen in a Brooklyn public
hospital collapsed, fell face-down on the floor, convulsed and for
nearly an hour -- while several hospital staff members looked at her
and one staff member even prodded her with her foot -- received no
aid. At some point during that time, she died.
The agency that runs the city's public hospitals responded by firing
six staff members involved -- including a director of psychiatry and
an on-duty physician -- and promising a list of improvements.
But the incident, which ended up on YouTube, has hit a raw nerve.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told re****ters he had seen the video and
was "disgusted."
"I can't explain what happened there," the mayor said earlier this
week. "Does it say anything about our society? 'I hope not' is the
basic answer."
After the incident received a wide public airing, the Health and
Hospitals Corp., which administers the city's public hospitals, agreed
to limit the number of patients in the emergency room to 25, and to
check on them every 15 minutes, in order to settle a federal lawsuit
filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others. The suit,
filed last year, describes the emergency room and inpatient unit at
Kings County Hospital Center, where the incident occurred, as "a
chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger" and said patients
are routinely neglected and drugged into submission.
"It is unconscionable that it took somebody keeling over and dying for
the city to come to the table in a meaningful way," Donna Lieberman,
executive director of the civil liberties union, said in a telephone
interview. "This is evidence of a profound lack of respect for the
humanity of people."
The woman, Esmin Elizabeth Green, 49, was taken to the hospital by
emergency medical service workers on June 18. She was suffering from
agitation and psychosis and was admitted involuntarily, according to
the Health and Hospitals Corp.
She waited almost 24 hours in the G Building, the psychiatric
emergency room, because of a shortage of beds, according to the
hospital cor****ation.
City lawyers gave video from surveillance cameras to the civil
liberties union as part of an evidence exchange for the court case.
The video, recorded in the early morning of June 19, shows Green,
wearing a pale-blue hospital gown, fall off a chair onto the floor.
About half an hour later, the video shows a security guard walk in,
look at her, face-down and unmoving, and walk away.
Elsewhere in the video, a security guard rolls his chair into the room
and out again, and another prods the woman with her foot.
About an hour after Green collapsed, hospital staff members rushed in
with a gurney to help her, but she was already dead, according to the
civil liberties union.
Afterward, the hospital's records contrasted with the account captured
on video. Green's patient record says she got up to use the bathroom
at 6 a.m. -- nearly half an hour after she collapsed -- and that she
"was sitting quietly in the waiting area" at 6:20 a.m. -- when the
video shows her lying on the floor.
=A9 2008 The Wa****ngton Post Company
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