FL - Barbara Dawson, 57, dies after being arrested for refusing to leave hospital ER

New Posts

As I was half listening to the news tonight, I heard the recording of her speaking to the police and my head whipped up. OMG! She sounded like she was drowning in fluid. This may have been a 25 bed tiny hospital not equipped to deal with more acute emergencies. At minimum, she should have been put back in a treatment room. If they didn't have the capabilities to treat, you call an ambulance and have them taken to the nearest hospital that does.

I didn't realize that in Florida, the hospitals are NOT required to treat you if you don't have insurance or can't pay. I had never heard of such a thing as I have never ever seen a patient turned away in the Mid Atlantic hospitals I worked in. My gosh, Army choppers would land out front of the hospital where I worked in NC back in the 80's and I know insurances weren't checked before loading the patient on the chopper and flying them in. This is long before hospitals had their own choppers btw.

Unfortunately, this woman seemed to be labeled a frequent flyer and they didn't take her seriously IMO. That combined with a medical someone not suspecting a PE or worse ended badly. Nurses may not be able to technically diagnose, but 9 times out of 10, they have begun the work up on the patient before an MD even sees the patient. They typically have a very good idea of what the differential diagnosis could be and get the ball rolling.

I am so so sorry this woman died the way she did. I still don't have all the facts, but if what I heard when she talked, through a TV was any indication, someone dropped the ball big time. IMOO
 
As rich as medical services may be, there is (in the US, at least) a sort of moral bankruptcy regarding medical services. Call me a bleeding heart, but my neighbor's health and material needs are my moral needs.
 
A small hospital like this does not probably have the best doctors and nurses on staff. If this lady was a frequent patient, the staff may not have been as attentive as they would be to a new patient.

Depending on when her last visit was, the diagnosis, and the tests that were run, may also have been a deciding factor in what was done this time.

Did I read that Florida does NOT have to treat an uninsured person? If so, this is so sad. Barbara must have known this but did not feel she could drive herself to another hospital. The hospitals in my state have to take you, so going to the ER is a 5-7 hour minimum wait! If you are really sick or hurt, you go in an ambulance to at least get a hallway position on a gurney.

My opinions only.
 
Tillicum said:
This is truly heartbreaking :(

Newly Released Police Dash-Cam Video Shows Arrest of Woman Who Died After Being Forced From Florida Hospital
Click to expand...

It really is heartbreaking. She tried so hard to get help and it was obvious to me she was short of breath even with the oxygen on.
Seems as though she had a history with the hospital and that may be part of why this happened.
I can't fault the officer but I do wonder why he felt the need to mention she was black during the call in for transport.
Amazing to me they thought she was pretending after her collapse. IMO
 
I had to turn it off right away. I couldn't stand to hear it. I heard enough to know this poor woman suffered terribly.
 
Zuri said:
As I was half listening to the news tonight, I heard the recording of her speaking to the police and my head whipped up. OMG! She sounded like she was drowning in fluid. This may have been a 25 bed tiny hospital not equipped to deal with more acute emergencies. At minimum, she should have been put back in a treatment room. If they didn't have the capabilities to treat, you call an ambulance and have them taken to the nearest hospital that does.

I didn't realize that in Florida, the hospitals are NOT required to treat you if you don't have insurance or can't pay. I had never heard of such a thing as I have never ever seen a patient turned away in the Mid Atlantic hospitals I worked in. My gosh, Army choppers would land out front of the hospital where I worked in NC back in the 80's and I know insurances weren't checked before loading the patient on the chopper and flying them in. This is long before hospitals had their own choppers btw.

Unfortunately, this woman seemed to be labeled a frequent flyer and they didn't take her seriously IMO. That combined with a medical someone not suspecting a PE or worse ended badly. Nurses may not be able to technically diagnose, but 9 times out of 10, they have begun the work up on the patient before an MD even sees the patient. They typically have a very good idea of what the differential diagnosis could be and get the ball rolling.

I am so so sorry this woman died the way she did. I still don't have all the facts, but if what I heard when she talked, through a TV was any indication, someone dropped the ball big time. IMOO
Click to expand...

I'm not a medical expert, but her voice sounded strong & clear to me.
 
Quote Originally Posted by meanmaryjean View Post
But then they remove the cuffs, take her back inside (sounds like under her own power), she is re-admitted and THEN dies?

Don't really see how the family thinks this is LEs fault? They are called to remove a discharged patient. They do so. They then escort her back in when she complains of symptoms. What did LE do wrong here?
Click to expand...

BBM
LE is wrong for being LE.

If it rains on someones parade, LE are guilty. JMO

Godspeed Barbara Dawson
 
PE is not an easy diagnosis. Does a 25 bed hospital even have the capability of a VQ scan plus a certified radiologist on hand to read the results? While indeed it does not sound like this woman received compassionate treatment, death rates are extremely high for PE - meaning that even had they found it, she may have still died.

I agree the actions of the hospital made the poor woman's last minutes miserable.

------------------

I once had to get quite "loud" at the nurse's station in a large city hospital where a loved one was a patient. I had gotten a call that my loved one was discharged, came to get her and discovered her to be extremely short of breath. I called the nurse, said I refused to take her out of the hospital with this amount of SOB and requested a doctor to come and recheck her. Waited and waited, finally he came. After she failed a pulse ox/ambulation test in the hall, he ordered a VQ scan. This was around 4:00PM on a Saturday. When no one had come to take the patient down for the VQ scan by 7:00PM I started to ask some hard questions of the nurse. Finally she told me, "we've decided the test can wait until Monday morning".

At that point my voice became quite loud as I demanded to know why when a doctor ordered a test at 4:00PM and I was in a major hospital that spent millions of dollars on continuous TV advertisements telling me it is "one of the top hospitals in the Eastern United States" that they can't run a needed test until MONDAY? I then asked if she wanted to call the doctor right then and there to clarify when he expected the test to be done or if she wanted me to track him down?

Within 15 minutes my loved one was on her way for the test. I later learned that the on-call radiologist didn't want to come in. Now, how about that?

The diagnosis was a PE. Fortunately when it hit the lung it broke up into a bunch of small pieces. My loved one was treated and survived.

NEVER be afraid to speak up - but just DON'T cuss or swear no matter how frustrated you are. Ask for another doctor to come for a second opinion, ask for a specialist to be called in. Ask for a nursing supervisor to be called. Ask for the patient advocate, a social worker, a hospital administrator. I am a great believer in the squeaky wheel gets oiled.
 
Just want to bring up that V/Q studies (ventilation/ perfusion) haven't been standard of care in emergency diagnosis of PE for quite a while-- probably more than 15 years. Helical CT, also called "spiral CT", is the new standard of care, and can be accomplished quickly. Many very small hospitals have this capability.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/361131-overview

Also, the use of outsourced distance-based radiology is also pretty much standard of care in many smaller hospitals, such as the Nighthawk group.

Simultaneous with an increase in after-hours exams, the workload per radiologist during daytime hours has also increased, not so much due to total imaging volume, but primarily because of workforce shortages. Over the past three years, many radiology groups covering small and even mid-size hospitals have found it difficult to provide effective 24-hour coverage.

Enter the “nighthawks,” a generic moniker applied to groups of American-trained diagnostic radiologists located in India and Australia who provide immediate diagnostic interpretation of CT images obtained in emergency rooms after hours. These images are shipped in digital form via broadband networks overseas from U.S. hospitals, enabled by a set of open digital imaging standards developed by the American College of Radiology more than a decade ago.

One of the largest of these groups is NightHawk Radiology Services based with five radiologists and 10 support staff in Australia, with an administrative office in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. These physicians are certified by the American Board of Radiology and licensed in the particular state of the hospital locale where the CT images originate.

It has been argued that the use of global outsourcing for night-time emergency imaging studies is cost-efficient and improves patient care. Because the nighthawks collect imaging exams from multiple hospitals, each radiologist can be fully occupied during the nightshift, as it were. And because the nightshift is really the dayshift with the 12-hour time difference between Asia and the United States, the radiologists are not subject to fatigue resulting from long on-call hours or upsetting their diurnal biologic clocks. And finally, accuracy of image interpretation is correlated, up to a point, with the volume of cases, so these nighthawks are able to keep a keen eye with a large volume of emergency CT studies to review.]
Click to expand...

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/Crossroads/09_09_04.html

I think some people may have a very outdated idea about what small hospitals are, and are not, and what their capabilities are. "Small" doesn't automatically mean backward, outdated, understaffed, and/ or incompetent.

If this woman had a massive saddle PE (which is sure what it sounds like), it wouldn't even be necessary for a highly trained radiologist to see it. It's pretty obvious on a CT. Saddle PE is hard to treat, has a high mortality, and there is not a lot of consensus on the best management, IMO. That said, you can't diagnose it without putting the patient into the CT scanner. I'm not sure at all what kind of care she had before being discharged the first time. Sad case. But I don't hold the police responsible here.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sad...hUKEwjbpeKSv5rKAhUB5iYKHUFpApEQsAQIGw&dpr=1.5
 
AlwaysShocked said:
PE is not an easy diagnosis. Does a 25 bed hospital even have the capability of a VQ scan plus a certified radiologist on hand to read the results? While indeed it does not sound like this woman received compassionate treatment, death rates are extremely high for PE - meaning that even had they found it, she may have still died.

I agree the actions of the hospital made the poor woman's last minutes miserable.

------------------

I once had to get quite "loud" at the nurse's station in a large city hospital where a loved one was a patient. I had gotten a call that my loved one was discharged, came to get her and discovered her to be extremely short of breath. I called the nurse, said I refused to take her out of the hospital with this amount of SOB and requested a doctor to come and recheck her. Waited and waited, finally he came. After she failed a pulse ox/ambulation test in the hall, he ordered a VQ scan. This was around 4:00PM on a Saturday. When no one had come to take the patient down for the VQ scan by 7:00PM I started to ask some hard questions of the nurse. Finally she told me, "we've decided the test can wait until Monday morning".

At that point my voice became quite loud as I demanded to know why when a doctor ordered a test at 4:00PM and I was in a major hospital that spent millions of dollars on continuous TV advertisements telling me it is "one of the top hospitals in the Eastern United States" that they can't run a needed test until MONDAY? I then asked if she wanted to call the doctor right then and there to clarify when he expected the test to be done or if she wanted me to track him down?

Within 15 minutes my loved one was on her way for the test. I later learned that the on-call radiologist didn't want to come in. Now, how about that?

The diagnosis was a PE. Fortunately when it hit the lung it broke up into a bunch of small pieces. My loved one was treated and survived.

NEVER be afraid to speak up - but just DON'T cuss or swear no matter how frustrated you are. Ask for another doctor to come for a second opinion, ask for a specialist to be called in. Ask for a nursing supervisor to be called. Ask for the patient advocate, a social worker, a hospital administrator. I am a great believer in the squeaky wheel gets oiled.
Click to expand...

And sometimes (sadly) you have to be that squeaky wheel. A nursing supervisor helped me in that last ER situation I posted about.
I insisted on seeing her. The nurse that was on staff (the one taking delight in upsetting me) said that I didn't have to do that she would tell her my concerns.
I objected and said I would find her myself. When I came back a few minutes later the supervisor was waiting.
She saw that the proper tests were done and everything went well on her watch.
Glad everything worked out well for you and that you stood firm for your family member.
 
[h=1]Hospital where woman in custody died cited for deficiencies[/h]
The hospital where a black woman died after she was forcibly removed from the emergency room by a white police officer was cited for 10 "deficiencies," including failing to properly examine the woman when she complained of difficulty breathing, state health officials said.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

DNASolves

Who is Escambia County John Doe (1989)?

Members online

... and 185 more.
Total: 3,595 (members: 186, guests: 3,409)

Online statistics

Members online
186
Guests online
3,409
Total visitors
3,595
Totals may include hidden visitors.

Forum statistics

Threads
592,428
Messages
17,968,722
Members
228,767
Latest member
Dont4get
Back
Top