Callous and crooked city-run NYC hospital

Vote Obama and you too can get treated like this

Shocking surveillance camera footage shows a [black] woman collapsing and dying on a hospital emergency room floor and then lying for an hour while staff walk past. The video has been released to the media as evidence by lawyers suing the hospital for neglect and the alleged abuse of mental health patients. The lawsuit will also allege that staff have falsified medical charts to cover up their inaction because during a period that Green is seen thrashing on the floor, her medical chart claims she was "awake, up and about, went to the bathroom", New York's Daily News reports.


The video shows 49-year-old Esmin Green keeling forward in a psychiatric emergency room in Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, where she was admitted to treat agitation and psychosis on June 19. Green is shown clutching at her stomach, thrashing on the floor before lying face-first on the tiled floor with her upper body lodged in the corner space between two sets of chairs.

Two other patients move around the room, security guards walk past and one even stares at Green for about 20 seconds but the woman is left prone until one of the patients gets help after about an hour has elapsed.

The two security guards shown in the video and four other hospital workers have been fired over the incident. The hospital had a lawsuit filed against it last year alleging horrific neglect and abuse of mental patients. There were claims patients who could not fight for themselves were left without care in unsanitary conditions, which prompted an investigation by New York City officials.

In reponse to the damning video and the other claims, the hospital says it is increasing staffing and bringing in new protocols, including that patients in the emergency room have to be checked every 15 minutes.

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Australia: Ambulance computer system fails yet again

We were orginally told it just needed oiling (or some such). For those who follow government computer systems, the initial description of it as "innovative" was all that was needed to predict the outcome

THE statewide rollout of the Emergency Services computer system has been put on hold after it went offline for a fourth time. Again ambulance and fire officers were forced to write incoming jobs on a whiteboard.

Yesterday morning's crash was the worst to date. All but two ambulance and fire communication centres were left without their computers for more than two hours, from before 3am until after 5am. Three previous system failures were put down to human error and the Department of Emergency Services said "early advice" was that human error was again to blame.

However Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts said the system's rollout to the remaining Central and South-eastern regions would be "put on hold" pending advice from the system's American supplier, who had been asked to analyse yesterday's outage. "I am advised that triple zero telephone and emergency services radio communications were not affected by this incident. Communication centre staff dispatched ambulance and fire crews using a manual back-up system," Mr Roberts said.

Fire officers have been highly critical of the new system, which they say has only been "half implemented" by the department making it ineffective. "The system is meant to locate the closest vehicle to an incident and dispatch that vehicle. But they're yet to install the automatic vehicle locaters in our trucks so it can do this," an officer said.

He said vehicles from two or three stations away were being sent to jobs instead and even driving past these manned stations on the way. "The most ridiculous example we had was when the computer tried to dispatch a vehicle from Capalaba station to a job on the Sunshine Coast," the officer said.

Fire communications centre staff have also raised concerns about screen freezes in the new system which can take valuable seconds off a job. "You're trying to talk to a coms centre operator and they're like, `Oh, wait a minute, the screen's frozen'. It happens every time," the officer said.

Mr Roberts said the "state of the art" computer-aided dispatch system was in use in communication centres across the world, including Australia and all of New Zealand's emergency services. "DES remains confident that its full implementation will result in improved response to calls for service from the community," he said.

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