Women Die Victim of Inexcusable Indifference by Staff at King-Harbor Hospital

Filed in archive Latin News on June 14, 2007

This is so awful, so awful, I've hesitated before writing about it. But I finally decided to write it, because people must know about things like this, and raise their voices against it, so it can be prevented from ever happening again.

Form the LATimes.com:
_________________________________
In the 40 minutes before a woman's death last month at martin luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, two separate callers pleaded with 911 dispatchers to send help because the hospital staff was ignoring her as she writhed on the floor, according to audio recordings of the calls.

"My wife is dying and the nurses don't want to help her out," Jose Prado, the woman's boyfriend, told the 911 dispatcher through an interpreter.

He was calling from a pay phone outside the hospital, his tone increasingly desperate as he described how his 43-year-old girlfriend was spitting up blood.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department dispatcher struggled to make sense of his predicament, then urged him to contact a doctor or nurse.

"Paramedics are not going to pick him up, or pick his wife up, from a hospital, because she's already at one," the dispatcher said.

Eight minutes later, an unidentified woman, apparently another patient, dialed 911 and reached a different dispatcher. After a short debate about whether the call was an emergency, the dispatcher scolded her and insisted that it was not. The 2 1/2 -minute call ended on a hostile note.

"May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted," the frustrated caller told the dispatcher, just before 2 a.m. on May 9.

"No. Negative ma'am, you're the one," the dispatcher responded before disconnecting.

The patient, Edith Isabel Rodriguez, was pronounced dead at 2:17 a.m., the victim of "inexcusable" indifference by staff at King-Harbor, county health officials later acknowledged.
_________________________________________

And that's it. I almost cried reading the full story. I just can't believe they just left a poor woman bleed to death in front of their eyes. I just can't. Why, why, would anyone do something like that?

I'm sorry, I can't say anything else right now.