Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

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Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby DamianaRaven » Fri Jan 12, 2018 6:12 pm

It gets worse. The weather was about 38 degrees and she was very disoriented and confused. Worst of all, she was wearing nothing but a hospital gown and slipper-socks, and had a big honking injury on her forehead that doesn't appear to have been treated in any way, certainly not dressed as it should have been.
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Re: Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby SandTea » Fri Jan 12, 2018 11:01 pm

After briefly saying she received proper medical care the hospital now takes "full responsibility".

“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.


Then they show everyone go on to try to deflect and feel better.

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.”


Patient dumping is scarily frequent. Maybe if hospitals didn't have to constantly worry about turning a profit it would be less of a problem but I'm just some armchair asshole so it's possible it would still happen.
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Re: Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby DamianaRaven » Thu Jan 18, 2018 7:42 pm

Apparently, jails are also considered a great place to dump "problem patients," and if they should happen to die there, it can be blamed on someone else.
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Re: Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby sunglasses » Thu Jan 18, 2018 8:42 pm

In his case he reported a headache and demanded narcotics. He was asked the leave the hospital and refused, hence the police being called. Is it sad he died? Of course, but this was not a situation of patient dumping. Normally people who are insisting at narcotics in the ER escalate quickly and can become a danger to other patients.

An alternate thought on this case, from Medium:

https://medium.com/@ZDoggMD/the-truth-b ... 867ebc7071

It brings up some uncomfortable points.

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.
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Re: Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby Lindvaettr » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:47 pm

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.


This is an excellent point to make about any emergency responders. Their jobs are hard. Far, far harder than most of our jobs. They work harder than nearly any of us do in a day, are in much worse situations on a daily basis than most of us will be in our lives. We make mistakes all the time in our mostly much cushier jobs, but still crucify people like this when they make a mistake, despite the difficulty of their jobs.

When we do accept the mistakes, we point to their funding being cut, or their training being wrong, or whatever, all the time. I, myself, have written quite a few posts here saying things like "The police aren't well trained enough". It might be true, but it's still putting all the blame at their level. Even with the best training and best funding, mistakes will always happen, and as long as we continue to let all our issues float downstream for them to get stuck dealing with.

It's something that's important to think about any time bad things happens. Maybe it happened because of maliciousness, sure, but the world is usually much more complicated than that. That's why it's so extremely important to reserve judgement on issues like these, and approach all sides of the story with an open mind. What's the point of putting energy into railing against the system and trying to solve the problems if we're railing against the wrong systems and trying to solve the wrong problems?
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Re: Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby DamianaRaven » Thu Jan 18, 2018 11:39 pm

Lindvaettr wrote:Their jobs are hard.


Lots and lots of people have hard jobs. My brother bends and cuts fucking steel for a living. Every day, he goes home sore and filthy. During major projects (like building the new Rangers' Stadium) he works sixty hour weeks for months on end, so there are plenty of people out there working every bit as hard as any health care provider. Nobody should be persecuted or vilified over a mistake, but I expect that people who can't handle their jobs should find another one, ESPECIALLY if they're in a position where mistakes can end someone's life. I know it sucks to burn out on a career in which you're heavily invested, but nobody should feel entitled to keep a job just because they like the money, or don't want to train for another industry.

Thanks in part to our wildly litigious culture, hospitals are absolutely TERRIBLE at firing people who screw up consistently. It's grossly ironic how much wrongdoing continues going on just so a hospital can pretend no one is ever doing anything wrong.
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Re: Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby sunglasses » Fri Jan 19, 2018 12:30 am

Ummm people get fired from hospitals all the time. Not sure why you think they don't?
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Re: Baltimore Hospital Dumps Patient at Bus Stop.

Postby DamianaRaven » Fri Jan 19, 2018 3:30 am

Just rumors I've heard here and there. That and my maternal grandmother was a TERRIBLE nurse who stole pain medications and nodded off on the job. Regional Medical Center (which was Anniston Memorial Hospital at the time) refused to fire her because doing so would mean admitting that they'd hired a junkie and tolerated her for any length of time. They were scared that word would get around their small town and then every patient who'd writhed in agony while Nurse Gladys was flying high on their pain meds would have solid grounds for a lawsuit. It didn't help that several patients got "drug seeking junkie" plastered all over their charts because they kept asking for pain relief. Instead of firing her ass like she (and her miserable patients) deserved, they actually offered her a severance package bribe to move on and be Someone Else's Problem.

It's
hardly
a
secret.

EDIT: I'm sure everyone remembers this wretched fuckwad.

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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