In the hospitals where I’ve worked, all staff are required to attend to patient distress by rendering services within our scope of practice, by directing the patient to the personnel who can be of assistance, or by alerting the next person in our chain of command that a patient is in distress and has unmet needs (this is, of course, more complex because of triage, but you get the idea). In the situation under discussion, there are some things I could do as a psychologist, but mostly I would have the responsibility of letting the patient know that I was going to talk to the charge nurse or manager and then get back to the patient with a response. This would be as true for the janitor as for me. ETA: It would also be true if the ER were not my unit, or if I were not on duty but happened to be passing through the ER on my way to the parking lot.
This entire paragraph already sounds like bullshit. You were diagnosed by an OB with a life-threatening condition and were told to go to an ER to “confirm” it? What does that mean? The OB wasn’t sure of his own diagnosis? The OB thought you had a life-threatening condition yet couldn’t be assed to call ahead to the ER himself or call you an ambulance? What “conditions” were you “diagnosed” with by the OB and why did you have to go to the ER to “confirm” it?
This whole scenario sounds garbled and not believable. Were you directed straight from the OB’s office? Or was this a situation where you called your OB with some kind of complaint or worry and he told you you could go to the ER if you wanted to?
Do you think you should have been given royal treatment and taken immediately into an OR or something because you didn’t like the smell of some perfume? It sounds like you didn’t really even have an emergency. I’m guessing they (accurately) saw you as a drama queen and directed you to sit down and shut up.
Why should they have let you loiter around outside the OR’s when they had to deal with people with real emergencies?
You had to “submit to life threatening conditions?” What the hell does that mean? You think that waiting in a waiting room like everybody else is a “life-threatneing condition?”
They had no REASON to compromise. You were a drama queen with no emergency who was demanding immediate special tretament and pretending to have an asthma attack. If the perfume was really bothering you that much, you could have gone outside to the parking lot for a few seconds.
No, that’s an ER staff acting responsibly and not letting an OR get hijacked by a drama queen with no emergency.
That’s their job.
Different situations. SHE had an emergency. YOU did NOT.
This is where you jump ship into absolute la la land. You passed out and the guards started beating you? Count me as like 30th person in this thread to find that completely unbelievable. It didn’t happen. It sounds like what did happen was that a guard tried to help you and then started freaking out and screaming and probably throwing punches and just generally chewing the scenery, acting like a jackass and being disruptive. Then Kelly told them he’d get you out of there so they let you go.
They also did not come back to “intimidate” you when you returned to go to the maternity ward. At most, they saw the crazy lady again and wanted to make sure that she wasn’t going to cause any more shit.
Why didn’t your doctor direct you to the maternity ward the first time? Why didn’t he call the ER before you got there?
None of this sounds believable to me, at least not as written. I think it’s probably a ludicrous exaggeration of real events. I’d love to hear the ER staff’s side of this story.
With regard to the OP. I concur with the consensus that while the 911 operator sounds a little callous, it was the hospital that was 100% at fault for this. How many 911 operators are trained to deal with medical emergencies from people who are already in hopsitals? I wouldn’t know how to deal with that either. It would seem like a misallocation of resources to send an ambulance to take a person frm one hospital to another, especially if that EMT team could be dealing with somebody lying in the street.
It was a bizarre situation. I can totally understand why the 911 guy responed the way he did.
Dio, that is an excellent analysis.
I also wonder about this:
Did lee and Kelly even have the option of returning to that hospital?
You know, that’s an excellent point! I must have missed it because I was too busy doing this :rolleyes:
Anyway, not arranging for proper medical transportation, which for someone with a “life-threatening condition” would require at least an ALS ambulance (possibly a critical care ambulance), would be an act of abandonment.
St. Urho
Paramedic
I just realized I got a pronoun wrong in this sentence. It wasn’t intentional, just a typo. My apologies to both Lee and KellyM if it looked like I was being snide.
Heh. Only on this board would someone open up with both barrels on another poster’s credibility, going line-by-line to detail why he thinks she’s completely full of shit, then apologize (sincerely, as far as I can tell) for the unintentional insult of referring to her male companion using the masculine pronoun.
Or at least I hope it’s only on this board.
(bolding mine)
You mean female companion.
Yeah, I think **lee **is full of shit on the security-guard beatings, too, but I’m getting uncomfortable with people who are being unkind to **KellyM **in the process. Her transsexualism isn’t related to lee’s full-of-shitness; if **KellyM **were cisgendered, **lee **would be just as full of shit.
Moreover, I’m not comfortable taking a position on whether or not strong perfume could cause an asthma attack… but I’d assume that anyone whose asthma is so severe that it is triggered by perfume has been long accustomed to carrying breathing masks around everywhere, or would call ahead to explain to the ER that it would be impossible to be in a common room with other people. A medical condition like this means that lee probably can’t ever go to public places at all, so is probably used to making appropriate adaptations.
It is NOT a disciplinary letter- it is merely an outline of what is expected in the position, with no indication that any previous behavior was unacceptable.
And the gal who resigned is not being disciplined, and would not have been- she merely hauled ass just in case.
Well, I’ve never been to AZ so I don’t know how citified y’all are. 
Central WAh still has cattle roaming our dirt roads, so I would never comment on another state’s cattle management.
Perhaps I’m being overly cynical, but did anyone else notice the “Remembering whathersname-thevictim” link on the side of the displinary-letters link?
I can’t help but feel we’re moving into stages three and four of these scenerios. Stage One: The tragedy.
Stage Two: Blame gets thrown about.
Stage Three: The victim is sainted.
Stage Four: The family tries to sue the crap out of anyone involved.
I don’t mean to be overly cruel in regards to the deceased. But I find myself jumping to conclusions fueled by past examples of public grief. I mean…is it really necessary to have a scene-by-scene breakdown of her funeral?
I find myself wondering, they clearly have a case and grounds for a suit. But where will the money come from when they win? I’m inferring from the articles that the hospital is pretty poor and largely funded by medicare. I can’t imagine a triage nurse working in an inner city hospital makes a huge amount of money. Would this fall under the hospital’s malpractice insurance? It seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but what do I know about the law? (Answer: very little).
The hospital already sounds like it’s struggling to survive. I know that in the past, some patients have demanded policy changes when their loved one is hurt/killed, but I have a bad feeling about this.
Cisgendered?
The opposite of Transgendered
IME the average security guard is terrified of touching a patient beating one down is practically unheard of unless they are partaking of some kind of violent behavior.
Lead nurse? Any security guard would be fired so fast s/he would have their uniform taken before they hit the door for even briefly fantasizing about challenging licenced staff on anything involving a patient. On the floor, security guards are 3rd class citizens who have to apologize for breathing the air unless called. A CNA has more authority than a guard in most instances. The only time I ever even saw more than 3 guards at the same time was during a major fight in a lockdown psych unit.
In addition, the typical response from any ER team to a profoundly pregnant woman is to call Labor/delivery and send you up and make them check you first.
…because you need an adjective to describe those who are happy to self-identify as being of the gender into which they were born and in which they were raised, obviously.
Part of the problem is, who do you pull of of their patients to check this one who has already been triaged and sent to wait further. The reason for the waiting room is…wait for it…every patient care provider in the ED is already covering their legally allowed patient load. Plus helping deal with the occasional critical case that comes in.
IMHO most of this falls on the triage nurse, she had a look, and dismissed her as non critical and the patient died.
It sucks but its a fact of life in the biz, mistakes = dead patient. Anyone works in that world has made a mistake and or has probably seen a patient die that may have made it if not for a med error or needed tool not put away/replaced promptly.
Emergency medical work is not pretty, a bad saturday night at any major metro ER is more horrifying than many people could ever imagine. Horror movie directors could never capture the kind of grinding desperation and pain that comes through those doors. I know from your posts you don’t understand that, its ok, its a good thing. Sometimes people die sitting in a hospital ER gurney before anyone has a chance to look them over thoroughly, this is little different. ER staff see people die every day, if the triage nurse can defend her assessment she will probably keep her licence and go to work at another ER for more money before she comes off suspension.
Oh, okay.
As far as KellyM goes, I don’t care if she thinks she’s a kangaroo-she’s still a bitch with a persecution complex and a big ass chip on her shoulder.
Interesting retronym (cisgendered), and one I’ve never heard before. I will duly file it in my retronym drawer along with “acoustic guitar,” “snail mail,” and “First World War.”
I’d just like to mention that I had no idea that KellyM was a transsexual. My comment was just an attempt to correct what I thought was a mistake. Looking back at it now, it does look embarrassingly unkind, and I apologize; it was not intended to be.