SubscribeVideo Shows No One Helped Dying Woman
From the New York Daily News:
Hospital video shows no one helped dying woman
BY JOHN MARZULLI
Monday, June 30th 2008
A shocking video shows a woman dying on the floor in the psych ward at Kings County Hospital, while people around her, including a security guard, did nothing to help.
After an hour, another mental patient finally got the attention of the indifferent hospital workers, according to the tape, obtained by the Daily News.
Worse still, the surveillance tape suggests hospital staff may have falsified medical charts to cover the utter lack of treatment provided Esmin Green before she died…
The city Department of Investigation is part of a sweeping probe that has brought some changes to the ward known as G Building.
A federal suit filed last year in Brooklyn alleged neglect and abuse of mental patients at the hospital. The suit sparked an investigation by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s civil rights unit before the June 19 death.
Two different security guards spotted Green, a native of the island of Jamaica, prone on the floor and did nothing, the tape shows. They have been fired, along with four other staffers.
Green, 49, taken to the unit for "agitation," keels over out of her chair at 5:32a.m., according to the time stamp on the video. She had been sitting about 3feet from an observation window. Two other patients were in the room.
Green is lying facedown on the floor, her legs splayed, when a security guard strolls by at 5:53 a.m., looks at her for about 20 seconds and then walks away.
She is writhing on the floor, thrashing her legs, about 6 a.m., when her medical chart contends she was "awake, up and about, went to the bathroom."
Green rolls on her back at 6:04a.m. She stops moving at 6:08 a.m., but two minutes later a security guard pushed his chair into camera view.
He never gets out of the chair, but looks at Green and scoots away. A female patient who was in and out of the room finally brings a clinic staffer to check the woman and a crash cart is summoned.
The medical chart claims she was "sitting quietly in [the] waiting room" at 6:20 a.m., although she was already dead…
Get used to this as we approach the new world of Obama/Hillary-care.
6 Responses to “Video Shows No One Helped Dying Woman”
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July 2nd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Well….it was in NYC.
Remember Kitty Genovese? I think that’s the correct name. Back in the 60s I think, stabbed to death in front of her apartment building. Neighbors heard her screams and did nothing.
Add to that the fact that this was a psych hospital.
I am a bit surprised about the security guards, but then, once again, it is a psych hospital and they’ve probably seen it all and have gotten into the “business as usual” syndrome.
Not that I’m down on NYC or anything, although the 1st Ms. Lurker was a Bronx girl.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Kitty Genovese
You’re right, Lurker. That happened a bit over two years before I was born, but I’ve heard of her. It sometimes frustrates me that so few people know her story.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Hey Diane. Was it the 60s or late 50s. Not that I’m trying to guess your age, but the ol’ Lurkers memory ain’t what it used to be.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm
March 13, 1964.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese
I would imagine most of us here know the name and something of the circumstances surrounding her death. Unfortunately, as Diane points out, we are a minority.
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:15 pm
This looks like the result of obama’s “National Health Care” plan to me…..we can look for a lot more once the “boomers” are regulated an “unecessary burden on the economy” and denied medicine and basic care by the liberals so the money can be better spent on social programs for the indigent and chronic unemployed.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 pm
You know I have a love/hate relationship with military hospitals (which are a prime example of government run healthcare). . .On balance I would say good care with the occassional situation/Dr that scared me to death (and wonder if death wasn’t a better option). I know of only one such situation - as this. Man enters ER at army hospital, complaining of chest pain and dies in the waiting room of a heart attack.
Watching that video shows pure callousness for the patient. The Army ER was just incompetance of one person who didn’t even understand their chart on Who Goes First and What is an Emergency (which I’ve seen are on the desk at all times). . .
But this people is indeed more of what you will get if the Dems get closer to ‘universal’ healthcare. Sorry I just want affordable health insurance - don’t give a dang about insuring the universe.