Woman dies in ER lobby as 911 refuses to help
Tapes show operators ignored pleas to send ambulance to L.A. hospital
Due to copywright laws I can't give you the story here but essentially a woman lay bleeding on an emergency room floor of an inner-city hospital in Los Angeles.
911 dispatchers refused to get any help for her after the hospital said they couldn't help her there.
Also, it appears that she died while the Police were wheeling her out of the hospital after arresting her for a parole violation!
Now please correct me if I am wrong but is there some reason that any human being, regardless of who they are, their history or their criminal background should EVER be treated this way?
I am normally not an advocate for "sue happy people" but in this case I would sue the asses off this Hospital. the Paramedics and the 911 Dispatchers just to make an example of how you can not have such a damned lack of caring for another human being!
I am really shocked by this story!
Jun 13, 2007
WTF?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
My wife works for the 911 center in a city of roughly 500,000 people. As added perspective, I used to do the same job, working my way up from dispatcher to supervisor.
The story about a woman dying on the floor of an ER is strange in a business that encounters strange circumstances on a regular basis. As an aside, we were once sued by a doctor whose wife died because there was a Garth Brooks concert in town.
We're in the business of sending a variety of emergency services to save lives and do this virtually every minute of the day. Our only mindset regarding ER personnel is, if you're there then you're in good hands. As a matter of policy, there's nothing more the 911 center is supposed to do.
I suspect that is true of 99.9% of the commcenters across the US.
If we're caught in a conflict between a citizen and ER personnel, our reflexive response is to go with whatever the ER personnel want to do. Because the ER personnel are the experts on medical care, we aren't.
If the ER tells us to move the individual, we'll send an ambulance to do that. Chances are, they won't.
The emphasis here should be on the management and supervision of the ER staff. They undoubtedly were the ones who told the police about the argumentative crowd in the hall, eliciting a typical response for the police to check their records and follow their own policy.
The police aren't experts in health care either; as policy, police do not haul sick people from the ER to jail, mainly because the municipality doesn't want to pay for medical services. They prefer to leave such people in the hospital and jail them when they're cured.
My educated guess is someone with "expert opinion" told the officers to take the victim out of the ER and the noisemakers with her.
Hi Bob,
Thanks for stopping by and putting a more human face on this story and for the opportunity to view this from a different perspective.
Carol
Post a Comment