# Woman disappears from hospital; found dead there two weeks later
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [October 10, 2013, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894 "2013-10-10T17:52:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/21 "2013-10-19T14:36:35Z")
[Similar case in Pittsburgh hospital.](http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/patient-89-found-dead-on-hospital-roof-624024/) Elderly female patient somehow made it up to the roof, where she froze.
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/22 "2013-10-19T16:17:00Z")
> [@teela\_brown](#):
>
> Now it’s being reported that a hospital orderly saw the unconscious woman in the stairwell and reported her.
>
> He even stepped over her - twice! - on his way up and down the stairs.
This just gets less and less explicable. I realize orderlies aren’t exactly Harvard grads, but you’d think that even on bedpan and sheet duty they’d recognize that an “unconscious” person anywhere in a hospital needs attention called to them right away - especially in an unusual area like a rarely-used stairway. Telling someone and never thinking of it again would seem to indicate subnormal intelligence, which is possible, I guess.
I’m beginning to doubt there will ever be an answer except in the most indirect circumstantial terms.
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/23 "2013-10-19T16:25:30Z")
> [@kayaker](#):
>
> [Similar case in Pittsburgh hospital.](http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/patient-89-found-dead-on-hospital-roof-624024/) Elderly female patient somehow made it up to the roof, where she froze.
And was missing for something less than 12 hours, with a history of wandering away. That’s almost reasonable, as a rare occurrence. A demented old woman made one final small - fatal - mistake.
Young, nominally healthy and normal woman inexplicably disappears from hospital room, major search fails to find her, a week later an orderly walks OVER her twice, and she’s not found in the hospital itself for two weeks? “Reasonable” isn’t even in the same universe.
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### Author:  [@svd678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/svd678)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/24 "2013-10-19T16:38:35Z")
Checking on a person lying on the floor is not a sheriff’s job. I once was visiting a hospital and wanted to go to another floor. When I got on the stairwell I found that the only way out was to go to the first floor and outside. I saw no warning signs or alarms. I thought it was a disaster waiting to happen, or at least a considerable annoyance.
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/25 "2013-10-19T16:46:49Z")
> [@svd678](#):
>
> Checking on a person lying on the floor is not a sheriff’s job.
I’m having trouble figuring out what you mean here - the sheriffs were already searching for a missing woman, although the case may have been filed since she wasn’t found in a day or two and this may have seemed unrelated.
Unless the orderly was of diminished capacity (and may well have been, if my experience with them is any guide) and was somehow not clear or believable in reporting the woman “unconscious” in the stairwell, there is no further excuse for the hospital or police not to have found her then.
> [@](#):
>
> I once was visiting a hospital and wanted to go to another floor. When I got on the stairwell I found that the only way out was to go to the first floor and outside. I saw no warning signs or alarms. I thought it was a disaster waiting to happen, or at least a considerable annoyance.
Such things do exist. If I lock myself out of my office’s back door into the central common area, I will have no choice but to hammer on a blind door hoping the insurance agent is in his office, or kick my (relatively lightweight) door back open. It’s a crappy setup the local inspector overlooked.
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### Author:  [@aNewLeaf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aNewLeaf)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/26 "2013-10-19T17:25:04Z")
“Orderly” is kind of nebulous. If it was Housekeeping, he likely has been ordered to never touch a patient. Report the situation to the person in charge and stay out of it, or words to that effect. Whether he did tell anybody is another question. And then there’s the possibility of language issues, it’s not uncommon.
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### Author:  [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/27 "2013-10-19T18:01:05Z")
> [@svd678](#):
>
> Checking on a person lying on the floor is not a sheriff’s job. I once was visiting a hospital and wanted to go to another floor. When I got on the stairwell I found that the only way out was to go to the first floor and outside. I saw no warning signs or alarms. I thought it was a disaster waiting to happen, or at least a considerable annoyance.
Many times, that’s because of issues like a building’s physical security concerns or simply because city codes don’t prohibit it. Chicago had a [high-rise fire in 2003](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-loopfire-specialpackage,0,5159483.special) where people attempted to descend a stairwell to escape, met thick smoke and had to turn around, and were faced with locked doors prohibiting their getting out of the stairwell. There were several deaths, unfortunately. After an investigation, the city codes changed to limit re-entry issues and require signs to be posted when certain floors prohibit re-entry.
I frankly don’t know if our hospital stairwells are alarmed, as I’m not over there that much, but I would suspect they are. They aren’t in my building, a clinic, simply because many people use them to get around and there aren’t any inpatient care areas.
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### Author:  [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/28 "2013-10-19T19:21:17Z")
> [@papergirl](#):
>
> I worked in a fairly small hospital, and this sounded like an impossible situation until I remembered something. In surgery, we had a “secret storage” room. You took an elevator to it, and when the elevator door opened you were in a room with no windows and only 1 other exit, to a stairwell. However, that stairwell was only accessible by one other door, one floor down, which you had to have a key card to get into.
One wonders what was inside such an elaborately hidden storage room.
Nazi gold?
Or just IV bags of Dilaudid?
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### Author:  [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2013, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/woman-disappears-from-hospital-found-dead-there-two-weeks-later/670894/29 "2013-10-19T19:44:59Z")
Our local hospital is a large conglomerate of several buildings attached and detached and expanded and built up to such an extent over the last four decades that even for me - who have volunteered there and visit some friend or family member at least twice a year there - it is basically an unrecognizable lay-out from one visit to the next. The back halls which provide a short cut one week are a dead-end the next.
I can certainly see something like this happening there, and months going by before anybody found the remains.
This story also speaks to the dangers of quantified management principals. Nurses and orderlies are vastly overworked, and are measured on efficiency in a manner more appropriate to a factory worker. If they don’t make the proper movement at the proper time they’ll never look successful by the end of the shift. Any small deviation requires the loss of a meal or a bathroom break to catch up.
In that context I can easily see how a finding like this is reported, and passed on, and never checked up on, because the people involved are already nervous about how the trip back upstairs to report the finding has affected their efficiency rating for the shift. The further down the chain you go, the truer this is.
In some corner office of some executive suite, before the end of next year, some bean counter will be showing a COO the chart which proves that the financial loss of allowing a few discretionary minutes per shift would far out-weigh whatever pay out the company had to make to this family. The folks who provide care on the front lines seldom see it that way, but the folks at the top have ways of squeezing and pressurizing the actions of the empathetic.
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