ONLY A 2 HOUR WAIT? THAT WOULD BE PROMPT IN A BRITISH OR AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC HOSPITAL

You can be having a heart attack in Australia and they won't even let you in the door. See here

The July death of a Waukegan woman who waited nearly two hours in a hospital waiting room was ruled a homicide today during a Lake County coroner's inquest. Though the immediate cause of Beatrice Vance's death in the early morning hours of July 29 was a heart attack, she also died 'as a result of gross deviations from the standard of care that a reasonable person would have exercised in this situation,' said Lake County Coroner Richard Keller, reading from the jury's verdict.

Members of Vance's family were present at the hearing, but declined to comment after the verdict was reached. Monique Vance Beatrice Vance's daughter who was with her mother in the waiting room of Vista Medical Center East has previously said she believes her mother died because she was made to wait too long.

'It's a staggering result,' said Allen N. Schwartz, a Chicago attorney retained by the family. Schwartz declined to comment further, saying he had not yet seen hospital records of Vance's hours at the hospital.

At the hearing in the county administration building in downtown Waukegan, Deputy Coroner Robert Barrett testified that he subpoenaed the records after noticing discrepancies in the hospital's version of events after Vance arrived at the emergency room at 10:15 p.m. July 28. Vance was seen by a triage nurse at 10:28 p.m. According to hospital records, she complained of nausea, sweating and chest pain of a level she rated as a '10, with one being the lowest and 10 being the highest,' Barrett testified. 'The triage nurse classified her condition as 'semi-emergent,'' he said. At 12:25 a.m., an emergency room nurse went to the waiting room and called for Vance, but got no response, he said. Vance was leaning on her side on a waiting room seat, unconscious and without a pulse.

Doctors rushed her into the emergency room, administered CPR and put Vance on intravenous blood thinners, Barrett said. At about 12:55 a.m., doctors were able to generate a weak pulse. About 10 minutes later, the pulse stopped and doctors restarted CPR. Vance was pronounced dead at 2 a.m.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here, the mirror site may be more up to date. My Home Page is here or here.

***************************