the first few paragraphs, click link for rest of story (too long to cut/paste)
In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.
"Thanks a lot, officers," an emergency room nurse told Los Angeles County police who brought in Rodriguez early May 9 after finding her in front of the Willowbrook hospital yelling for help. "This is her third time here."
The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for abdominal pain. She'd been given prescription medication and a doctor's appointment.
Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, "You have already been seen, and there is nothing we can do," according to a report by the county office of public safety, which provides security at the hospital.
Parked in the emergency room lobby in a wheelchair after police left, she fell to the floor. She lay on the linoleum, writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.
Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone's apparent indifference.
Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.
Alerted to the "disturbance" in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez's record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.
interesting. says she was in for abd pain 3x in 3 days,but never what they did for her test wise, or what they suspected her diagnosis was, etc.
I'm not a nurse yet, I don't pretend to have any experience at all.
I'm curious though chuck1234, I see you have Med/Surg and ICU experience. Have you had an oportunity to spend any time working in the ER? If so, how much time did you have an oportunity for?
It's not the collapsing on the floor that was the problem, it was the triage nurse telling her that she had just been seen, there's nothing more to be done. She was never reassessed.
It says that the nurse said that there's nothing they can do for her. She didn't say to go away, and didn't say that she wasn't going to see her. She probably just got bumped to the bottom of the list.
It's not the nurse's job to tell a pt "You've already been seen and there's nothing more we can do." That is a blatant violation of EMTALA because a pt could very easily take that as refusal of services.
cardiacRN2006, ADN, RN
4,106 Posts
Lol, so it's the poor assessment of the nurse, not the MD that is the 'cause of death'?