<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=440 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=headlineblack style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 10px; PADDING-TOP: 5px">Death of Heart Attack Victim Who Waited for Hours in Illinois Hospital Waiting Room Ruled Homicide</TD></TR><TR><TD class=storytext style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 10px">Friday, September 15, 2006 WAUKEGAN, Ill. — A coroner's jury has declared the death of a heart attack victim who spent almost two hours in a hospital waiting room to be a homicide. Beatrice Vance, 49, died of a heart attack, but the jury at a coroner's inquest ruled Thursday that her death also was "a result of gross deviations from the standard of care that a reasonable person would have exercised in this situation." A spokeswoman for Vista Medical Center in Waukegan, where Vance died July 29, declined to comment on the ruling. Vance had waited almost two hours for a doctor to see her after complaining of classic heart attack symptoms — nausea, shortness of breath and chest pains, Deputy Coroner Robert Barrett testified. She was seen by a triage nurse about 15 minutes after she arrived, and the nurse classified her condition as "semi-emergent," Barrett said. He said Vance's daughter twice asked nurses after that when her mother would see a doctor. When her name was finally called, a nurse found Vance slumped unconscious in a waiting room chair without a pulse. Barrett said. She was pronounced dead shortly afterward. Barrett said he subpoenaed records after finding discrepancies in the hospital's version of events. It wasn't immediately clear if the ruling would lead to criminal charges. Dan Shanes, a chief of felony review for the state attorney's office, said his division needed to review the case. Vista Medical Center spokeswoman Cheryl Maynen said the hospital, just north of Chicago, cooperated with the coroner's investigation and had also investigated the incident. She declined to comment on the homicide ruling. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
That's it, ban all emergency rooms!!!!! It's for the kids On a serious note that really does suck. Fortunatly most of the hospitals in the Memphis area have special cardiac areas. If you go in with anything kinda like symptoms of a HA or you say "I think I'm having a HA" you are rushed in and treated, NOW!! I know not from personal experiance, but one of my best friends had an experiance with cardiac care last year. My guess is that the family of the deceased will get lots of $$ from the lawsuit/settlement. Ryan
I KNOW thats SOP at Truman med center in down town KC MO. I knew a guy in highschool that walked in gut shot and bled to death in their waiting room. Took Tina in when she was short of breath, light headed, pain/numbness in her left arm, pressure/pain in her chest and told the receptionest we thought she might be haveing a heartattack and the symptoms and they sent us to the waiting room. After about 1 hour they still had not even done triage on her of any type. She FINNALY agreed to leave and go to a REAL hospital then since she realized that a bunch of staff were going to need med attention if either she wasnt seen SOON or we leave. Thats also the hospital that released my best friend less than 10 minutes before he died in their parking lot then took over 30 minutes from the time they were notified to get anyone the 100 yards or so from the ER to where he was laying under their life flight pad, they even let it slip that that wasnt that uncommon there. They NEED to start holding hospital accountable for this kind of crap and charge them for depraved indifference at the least when this type of crap happens. Instead they have extra laws to protect them from even lawsuits when they pull crap like this to make sure its harder for survivors to even make them pay in a monetary sense for what they do.
Have you been in an emergency room late on a weekend? It's a sad sight. Lots of pain, blood and waiting.
Yes I have, but it’s been a while though, I’m lucky out here you get right in at any hospital here. I guess that’s one of the things different between urban and country settings. I have needed the emergency room a few times in my life and my life depended on getting attention to my wounds in a timely fashion. I have had some pretty severe injuries.
Had a saying where I come from. 'Never get sick in (name) county.' It's almost assured you will have a slow death. Stub your toe enough to merit a trip to the ER and you may walk out with something far more serious, if you walk out at all. That's what happens when the main ER in your area is in a hospital that is used by college students as a training grounds. Seen many 'doctors' and 'nurses' chatting to their boy/girlfriends on their cells about the new hottie intern while people are needing help. If I go in for something serious and find this to be the case, I can forsee a lawsuit and possible jail time in my future as that cell phone may just turn into a plug for their nether region. It is such a wonderful thing being a doctor in today's world. What other occupation can you get paid vast amounts of money to kill people by either misdiagnoses, malpractice, or just uncaring sloth? Man I'm in the wrong field. Oh wait. I remember now why I'm not a doctor. I think to be hired in most hospitals you have to be lacking all moral components. Too bad for me. I don't like hospitals at all. Hate when I have to go to them. Too many people I know died there. It's like I'm a child scared of them. Maybe I'm right to be paranoid. Seems to fall true that more people die in them than out of them. I think the only place with more dead people than a hospital is a morgue, and you can bet they are fresh from the hospital. We need not only a more accountable hospital staff, also a government staff as well. The word of the age now is responsibility and you are encouraged at any given time to not take any. Blame others, blame circumstance or just blame the weather. Blame anything except for yourself. Blaming yourself for a screwup may lead to a detrimental self-esteem problem and we can't have people feeling bad. That is just downright un-American. We have to promote tolerance and praise even when the job is done so horribly wrong as to make Hitler look like a boyscout. Just some thoughts.
Did y'all hear about the death(s) of the premie babies that were given adult dosages of an anti-coagulant (SP?) ? Seems that the mfg puts the adult and premie dosages in the same type of packaging. I'll bet somewhere on the label it says the dosage!!! So the nurse "assumes" the medicine in the cabinet is the correct one. Just because some person (who can make mistakes) stocks the cabinet and they are supposed to check the dosage. Yeah, right, if you are a nurse or Dr. giving out medicine YOU are responsable for the dosage. Just like I make sure the pharmacy gives me the correct drugs. While I've never had a problem, I hope I never do, but they tell you what the pill looks like for a reason. Man, I hate the health care industry (at least until I get sick) and I hate the insurance industry even more. Ryan
