“We take full responsibility for this failure,” Dr. Mohan Suntha said during a Thursday afternoon news conference. The hospital did not provide “basic humanity and compassion,” he added.
Suntha, the Baltimore hospital’s president and CEO, said the hospital system is investigating the incident and is talking to everyone who came into contact with the woman, including guards, nurses and doctors. It also is reviewing its discharge policies.
Suntha said the incident didn’t reflect the mission of the medical system.
“We do not believe what happened defines who we are as an organization,” he said.
said Ricarra Jones, political organizer for the 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East labor union.
“There are examples of patients who abuse our employees,” she said. “We have to figure out how to deal with those situations when it happens. We have to protect our employees in those cases.”
He is heard in the video asking the hospital’s security officers several times why they put the woman out of the hospital.
“Y’all are just going to leave this lady out here with no clothes?” Baraka [the man who filmed the video] asks, noting how cold it is outside.
One of the guards eventually responds: “Due to the circumstances of what happened.”
What if the ER, already quite busy trying to handle numerous other emergencies, determined she did not meet criteria to be admitted?
A lot of armchair psychiatrists are screaming, “It’s clear this woman should be in the hospital. She’s crazy and not competent to care for herself,” forgetting that mental status can wax and wane very quickly, and while being evaluated one’s competency is judged during a discrete time period by professionals (as opposed to a few minutes of cellphone video taken on the street). What if it’s also against the law to hold a patient against their will unless they demonstrate during the evaluation period that they are a danger to themselves or others?
What if this woman did not meet those criteria during evaluation, was offered a transfer to a shelter and refused, had burned her bridges at other shelters, and burned her bridges with family and friends?
What if there was violence on the part of the patient, with altercations and refusal to follow commands in the hospital after discharge, ultimately leading to an escort by multiple security personnel due to the strength and potential danger she posed to the staff? Let’s hypothetically imagine that this is what happened. Should she have been thrown out into the cold in nothing but a gown?
What if she was given all her clothes and told to dress but refused to do so. What would you say then? Would you say, “Could it be her mental illness? Or could it be that she made a choice? Could it be that the security guards made a mistake, having dealt with so much belligerence and so many difficult patients?”
We don’t know. But here’s something that isn’t hypothetical: this case is a picture of disaster from start to finish in a city struggling with poverty, with difficult race relations, with inequity, with mental illness, with homelessness, with substance abuse. We shoulder our institutions of healthcare with the burden of solving the upstream societal problems that our pathetic, short-sighted political leaders have lacked the courage and human decency to address. We medicalize our social problems in the US, and then scream accusations at our frontline healthcare workers who are tasked with doing the impossible despite burnout, physical risk, daily humiliation and constant devaluation.
We look to our hospitals, to our doctors, to our nurses, to our respiratory therapists, to our social workers, to our psychiatrists, to our case managers, to our discharge planners, to solve the problems that we’ve been collectively too craven to solve ourselves. Then when a tragedy like this is documented on video (and this is just the tip of the iceberg), we ignore our failure to manage the root cause of the problem, instead pointing at the nearest scapegoat. People are outraged at the emergency department. Yeah, you should be outraged. You should be mad at the emergency department for failing in the face of impossible odds. But you should be furious at the larger system that failed this woman and hundreds of thousands of others like her who suffer daily.
Zevran wrote:Magic can kill. Knives can kill. Even small children launched at great speeds can kill.
Sunny's Medium Quote wrote:We don’t know. But here’s something that isn’t hypothetical: this case is a picture of disaster from start to finish in a city struggling with poverty, with difficult race relations, with inequity, with mental illness, with homelessness, with substance abuse. We shoulder our institutions of healthcare with the burden of solving the upstream societal problems that our pathetic, short-sighted political leaders have lacked the courage and human decency to address. We medicalize our social problems in the US, and then scream accusations at our frontline healthcare workers who are tasked with doing the impossible despite burnout, physical risk, daily humiliation and constant devaluation.
We look to our hospitals, to our doctors, to our nurses, to our respiratory therapists, to our social workers, to our psychiatrists, to our case managers, to our discharge planners, to solve the problems that we’ve been collectively too craven to solve ourselves. Then when a tragedy like this is documented on video (and this is just the tip of the iceberg), we ignore our failure to manage the root cause of the problem, instead pointing at the nearest scapegoat. People are outraged at the emergency department. Yeah, you should be outraged. You should be mad at the emergency department for failing in the face of impossible odds. But you should be furious at the larger system that failed this woman and hundreds of thousands of others like her who suffer daily.
Lindvaettr wrote:Their jobs are hard.
Zevran wrote:Magic can kill. Knives can kill. Even small children launched at great speeds can kill.
And if you're out there wondering why hospitals don't crack down and start drug testing hourly to flush all of the users out of their system ... they can't. We're currently facing a national nurse shortage; they already don't have enough staff to carry the load.
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