Left to Die in a Place That Has the Mission of Saving Our Lives

By John Zimmerman

When it was over, her life was over; all there was left for the hospital to do was to mop up the blood. The blood she had vomited while she lay on the emergency room floor. Waiting for help that came too late, even while she writhed in pain, for 45 minutes, from a perforated bowel. Even while her terrified relatives begged the emergency room staff to help her. Even after her boyfriend went to the ironic extreme of calling 911 – even though she was already in the emergency room – only to be told to find a doctor.

But the problem was that the doctors weren’t finding her. At least, not until they could do nothing but pronounce her dead.

These are the news accounts of the final minutes of Edith Isabel Rodriguez’s life, in the emergency room of an inner-city hospital in Los Angeles.

Rodriguez not only had the misfortune of suffering a horrible illness that might not have killed her had she been seen promptly. She also had the bad luck of not having the wealth to own that plastic health insurance card that most certainly would have had her in a place better than that hellhole of a hospital.

But this is about more than “fundamentally a failure of caring,” as aptly summarized by a Los Angeles County health official. It’s about all of us having to wait way too long to get a wound stitched, a broken arm set or a pain in our belly treated before we bleed out on the ER floor.

According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 40 to 50 percent of U.S. hospital emergency rooms are overcrowded. It is even worse at hospitals in metropolitan areas, where nearly two- thirds of ERs are at times bursting at the seam with patients.

What happened to Edith Isabel Rodriguez made me wish she had the luck to have been seen at Adventist GlenOaks in Glendale Heights. Just days before Rodriguez’s death, GlenOaks opened a new emergency room department – that promises treatment within 15 minutes of the patient’s arrival.

That would really be something, considering that in Illinois, hospital patients spend an average of 3.3 hours, or 201 minutes, in the emergency room, according to a survey released in the spring of 2006 by Press Ganey Associates, which measures patient satisfaction for hospitals.

Keep in mind that is an average. Not all hospitals have a waiting list this long.

But I like what GlenOaks is doing. Hopefully it is part of a trend in emergency health care.

At the same time I have sympathy for hospitals and emergency room staff. They are clearly having to see too many people with illnesses and injuries that don’t demand immediate attention. That just makes it more difficult to do the job intended – tend to injuries, poisonings and heart attacks. Up to 10 percent of patient visits to ERs were classified as “non-urgent,” according to the CDC.

Some of these are people who don’t want to wait days to see their personal physicians who are part of the “can’t-see-you-today” HMO mill. And who can blame them, when they think their child is really, really sick and needs to be looked at right away.

But emergency rooms are also being flooded with millions of uninsured people seeking both urgent and non-urgent care. Meanwhile, hospitals are forced to shift the burden of these costly unpaid bills onto patients with insurance. Which just drives up the overall cost of health care.

Sometimes these patients fall through the cracks, or onto emergency room floors, where they are left to die.

Health care reform, left undone in the discussion stage, comes too late for them.

Jzimmerman@@dailyherald.com

(c) 2007 Daily Herald; Arlington Heights, Ill.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.