Comments on: “Death after two-hour ER wait ruled homicide”

By: Supremacy Claus

Supremacy Claus — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:53:12 +0000

Perhaps, this error is a homicide. The 20% of innocent people on death row, after months of trial and appeals, $1 million in legal costs, then qualifies for homicide by all parties involved.

By: Deoxy

Deoxy — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 10:03:12 +0000

JT,

You leave out vital details.

WHY did he have to wait? If the average number of patients on any given day is 150, and the hospital had 450 arrive within a 2 hour period, well, what do you suggest they do? Staff sufficiently for 450 all the time? And you wouldn’t complain about the doubling of all hospital costs when they did that, right?!?

That they found him another hospital less than 30 miles away tells me that the hospital in question was out of resources, yet still trying to help people (not leaving them there until their OWN resources became available).

In short, barring other evidence, your story tells me that the hospital in question did nothing wrong, they just had more patients than beds and other equipment.

By: nevins

nevins — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 21:36:07 +0000

The problem is that no ER can be staffed to provide immediate walk-up attention to every patient. So they triage, making a rapid assessment as to the acuity of each patient’s condition. Triage is of necessity an incomplete medical evaluation and is sometimes wrong.

In an ideal world no patient would undergo triage prior to definitive care. But presently, no one is willing to pay for emergency rooms to be build large enough and staffed sufficiently to accomodate every walk-in patient without delay. Not even wealthy communities afford themselves this luxury.

By: J.T. Wenting

J.T. Wenting — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 12:12:06 +0000

good decision. But I may be biassed as my father narrowly survived a very similar episode where he (after suffering a severe heart attack) had to wait on a stretcher (they didn’t even give him a bed) without heart monitors or any other attention of machines or people for over 2 hours until someone found a place for him in another hospital 50km away, then had to wait another hour for the ambulance to arrive to take him there (under some obscure rule here ambulances cannot transport patients to hospitals those ambulances are not assigned to, the destination hospital has to send one to pick them up), then lie in that ambulance for an hour to get to that other hospital (luckily that ambulance did have the proper equipment and trained staff to keep him alive).

Had he died you can be sure we’d have filed criminal charges against the hospital for negligent homicide.

By: tyree

tyree — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:59:45 +0000

And if the wait was due to illegal immigrants crowding the emergency room, do we sue their country of origin, or the US gvernment or both?