Brooklyn Hospital Condemned Over Ignorance in Woman’s Death
By Dan Keane
11:48, July 3rd 2008
62 votes
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The video with the dying patient totally ignored by the medical staff at Kings County Hospital Center has shocked the entire New York, leaving even its top official “disgusted.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he was “horrified” while watching the video showing Esmin Elizabeth Green, a 49-year-old woman, collapsing on the hospital’s floor and lying there for an hour with no help at all from the medical staff.

Green was brought at the hospital on June 18 showing signs of agitation and psychosis. She was left waiting in the emergency room for nearly 24 hours because the hospital had no beds available at that time. After a day of terrible struggle, she fell off her chair at 5:32 am on June 19. Half an hour later, the video shows a security guard walking in to look at the woman, but then walking away as she lies motionless. Then another staff member can be seen prodding Green with her foot.

Only an hour later, staff members thought of reviving her, but, unfortunately, it was too late. Green was already dead.

“That it took somebody keeling over and dying, and it being captured on videotape, for the city to come to the table in a meaningful way is unconscionable. This is evidence of a profound lack of respect for the humanity of people,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said at a news conference in Lower Manhattan, according to the New York Times.

The New York Civil Liberties Union along with the New York State Mental Hygiene Legal Service and Kirland &Ellis LLP filed a lawsuit last year accusing Kings County Hospital Center of physically abusing its patients, of keeping them in “overcrowded and squalid conditions” and of administering them “unnecessary and punitive injections of mind-altering drugs,” the lawsuit reads.

Dennis Feld, de deputy director of special litigation and appeals with Mental Hygiene Legal Service called for “immediate reform” “to protect the health and wellbeing of vulnerable Brooklyn residents who must rely on the hospital for care.”

For the moment, the director of psychiatry, the doctor of duty and the director of security at Kings County were fired. Also, two nurses and a security guard had been suspended pending union-mandated hearings, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the hospital, said.

Moreover, under the court agreement, the hospital is required to have no more than 25 patients in the emergency room at any time and to check on them every 15 minutes, and to shorten the median waiting time around 10 hours over the next four months.

President of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, Alan D. Aviles, in a written statement on Tuesday, promised a thorough investigation on the case and also improvements.

“There is, however, much more work that must be done before the psychiatric unit at Kings County will ever begin to approach a true place of compassionate, professional and responsible care,” Beth Haroules, the New York Civil Liberties Union’s lead counsel on the case said, as quoted by the North Country Gazette.



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