Edith Isabel Rodriguez writhed for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Los Angeles as staffers walked past and a janitor mopped around her. The infamous incident in May 2007 was captured by a security camera, but the Los Angeles County has insisted for more than a year that the tape is "confidential, official information." Now, however, excerpts of the grainy video were sent anonymously to the Los Angeles Times and are available on the newspaper's website.
Video from a surveillance camera at a Brooklyn, NY, hospital shows a woman dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency room while being ignored by other patients and hospital staff. The video was released by lawyers suing Kings County Hospital alleging neglect and abuse of mental health patients. The video shows the 49-year-old woman keeling over and falling out of her chair and lying facedown on the floor, then thrashing before going still. About an hour passed before someone tried to help.
Bar codes were long touted as the perfect solution to medication mistakes in hospitals. But bar codes make new problems and aren't the panacea that safety advocates expected, according to a research team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Bar coding has not yet been proven to reduce medication errors, and often the shortcuts that caregivers develop undermine its effectiveness, the researchers found.
The third report since 2004 on how California hospitals treat pneumonia found that patients at the worst- performing hospitals were twice as likely to die as those at the best-ranked hospitals. Los Angeles County is in decent shape, with 20 of 92 hospitals surveyed that rated "better than expected" and four that rated "worse than expected." The report looked at 30-day mortality rates for community- acquired pneumonia between January 2003 and November 2005.
Five Palm Beach County, FL, hospitals were cited in 2007 for violating a federal law to prevent patient dumping. Federal records show the hospitals denied about 30 patients emergency specialty care they should have provided. None of the hospitals was fined or lost its Medicare license, the potential consequences of violations. The violations offer a snapshot of how emergency patients get passed among hospitals and highlight a broader crisis in emergency specialty care.
There were 1,002 cases of serious medical harm disclosed by California hospitals between July 2007 and May of this year, according to disclosures made under a state law that requires hospitals to inform health regulators of all substantial injuries to their patients. State investigators found some errors occurred because hospitals failed to follow safeguards designed specifically to prevent harm.