Ignored Psychiatric Patient Dies On Floor Of Hospital Waiting Room

Some years ago, there was a cartoon showing a skeleton sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with an outdated magazine in its hand. Now life has imitated cartoon art: after waiting 24 hours in a New York City psychiatric hospital’s waiting room, a video shows a black woman falling to the floor and people streaming in and out seemingly oblivious to her until she is finally “discovered” roughly an hour later — and taken away dead.

In the new Internet info age, the tragedy (and what qualifies as an outrage) can be seen on You Tube. Here is an edited version of it that shows her collapse and the time gap between when she was “discovered” by hospital officials and taken away after people came in and out and seemingly didn’t notice the somewhat-noticeable clump on the floor — yet another sign of 21st century indifference.

ABC reports:

Even pared down to a few minutes, the hour-long surveillance video is disturbing.

At 5:32 a.m. June 19, a woman in a hospital gown in the waiting area of the psychiatric emergency room of a New York City hospital topples first to her knees before collapsing on her face.

A full hour passes. Other people stream in and out of the waiting room, including hospital security guards. The woman writes something on the ground before going completely still. Finally, someone takes notice and alerts the staff. But by then, at 6:36 a.m., the woman is already dead.

The woman, 49-year-old Esmin Green, died on the floor of the waiting room at the Kings County Hospital Center Psychiatric Emergency Department. Her exact cause of death has not been released.

The story — and You Tube — is now making the rounds worldwide, and there have been some immediately consequences: some hospital workers have been fired amid allegations that some hospital personnel tried to tinker with the time scale of what happened on Green’s records:

Several employees at Kings County Hospital have been fired after a disturbing videotape surfaced showing a woman dying in a waiting room, while workers did nothing.

The New York Civil Liberties Union released the video, which was taken two weeks ago…The NYCLU also says hospital workers fudged the time scale of the incident on Green’s medical records.

Now the group says the hospital, which is run by the city, will give patients in the waiting room a checkup every 15 minutes, and limit the number of patients to 25 at a time.

“The reason why this woman died the way she did is because there is a culture of indifference to patients that permeates every aspect of KCHC’s psychiatric care. Nothing short of that,” said civil rights lawyer Rob Cohen.

“I can’t explain what happened there,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg of the incident. “I think what they said was, ‘Oh well people sleep on the floor all the time and I didn’t pay any attention.’ They shouldn’t be sleeping on the floor, number one, and you should pay attention.”

Some more details on the allegations of an attempted cover up:

The medical report that logged Green’s death shows that staff had tried to cover up the incident. According to them, she was “sitting quietly in [the] waiting room” until 6:20 am when they noticed she had passed away and immediately tried to help her. Unfortunately for them, the CCTV footage proves quite the opposite. The video was released by the New York Civil Liberty Union, who had filed a case against the hospital for filthy conditions and the abuse of sedatives about a year earlier. The lawsuit would likely have been left at the bottom of a pile, but might be taken more seriously now.

AND:

Hospital records stated the patient was awake and going to the bathroom when the video showed she was facedown on the floor, Lieberman said.

“We are shocked and distressed by this situation. It is clear that some of our employees failed to act based on our compassionate standards of care,” said city Health and Hospitals Corp. president Alan D. Aviles in a statement yesterday.

Investigators are now reportedly considering criminal charges against some of those who were involved. Meanwhile, New York City officials have agreed in court to implement psychiatric-ward reforms, in light of the shocking incident. Here are some details you didn’t see on the edited tape:

Esmin Green, 49, had been waiting in the emergency room for nearly 24 hours when she toppled from her seat at 5:32 a.m. June 19, falling face down on the floor.

She was dead by 6:35, when someone on the medical staff, flagged down by a person in the waiting room, finally approached, nudged Green with her foot, and gently prodded her shoulder, as if to wake her. The staffer then left and returned with someone wearing a white lab coat who examined her and summoned help.

Until the staffer’s appearance, Green’s collapse barely caused a ripple. Other patients waiting a few feet away didn’t react. Security guards and a member of the hospital’s staff appeared to notice her prone body at least three times, but made no visible attempt to see whether she needed help.

One guard didn’t even leave his chair, rolling it around a corner to stare at the body, then rolling away a few moments later.

The story and video have sparked consternation around the world. A post on the Chicago Tribune blog has says:

This is our worst fear, isn’t it?

Being abandoned or, even worse, ignored in our time of greatest need.

It’s the reason we can’t turn away from the story of the Esmin Green, who collapsed in the emergency room of Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn after waiting almost 24 hours for help….

….It’s a public hospital, by all accounts squalid and under-funded, a place none of us would want to take our final breath, given a choice.

Did Esmin Green have a mother who cuddled her when she was a baby? A brother or sister who played with her on the street? Friends who looked forward to a phone call? A child of her own?

Does anyone deserve to die this way – abandoned by those who might have helped, ignored by those in the grips of their own suffering or the disaffection of boredom?

In reality, this is one more case showing something seriously wrong in the compassion department in modern America — which first realized that some Americans apparently had a shocking new I-don’t-want-to-be-involved gene some 40 years ago…

The most widely publicized indifference incident that shocked America came in 1964, when Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in New York City near her home in Queens. News reports said she had been screaming for help for more than a half hour as she was being systematically butchered and no neighbors got involved or called 911 because they didn’t want to get involved. Later info surfaced putting this allegation into some doubt, but the genie had been let out of the bottle.

There have been other various incidents over the years indicating a growing indifference. One of the most shocking came earlier this month in Hartford, Connecticut when a 78-year-old man was hit by a car in a hit and run incident –and pedestrians and passing cars ignore him as he lies in the street. He has been left paralyzed from the waist down. The video of that is also a monument to indifference: