The plot thickens - dead woman in hospital stairwell -

[truedelphi]

So this week, KRON-TV in San Francisco has been carrying the story of all the emails relating to how the Administration and staff at San Francisco General Hospital were annoyed by and/or amused by family members of Lynne Spalding as the family was insisting that the hospital look for, and locate their missing relative.

This crime occurred back in September/October 2013.


http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Body-Found-at-SF-General-Is-Missing-Woman-Lynne-Spalding-227095731.html

Seventeen days after a 57-year-old patient disappeared San Francisco General Hospital, the county coroner confirmed late Wednesday that the body found in a stairwell this week was that of Lynne Spalding.
(Snip)
####

According to KRON-TV's broadcasts earlier this week of January 7th 2014, the Hospital Administrator told the Spalding family that staff would be required to look for her, and they told the family all stairwells would be searched. However, it turns out that since there was no money for overtime for the search, the staff did not do a thorough job of looking.

And in fact, the stairwell where the woman's dead body was found had not been part of the search.

Emails from staff revealed that the hospital staff callously considered the family's request for a search to be the result of one woman family member's hysteria. And the staff told each other that the woman had discharged herself, and was probably at home! All of this was accompanied by requisite smiley faces and LOL's.

It seems that although we are now in the 21st Century, we have hospitals that don't bother to use the latest technology. You enter a hospital, you have to put on one of those annoying plastic ID bracelets. Why those bracelets can't have a GPS locator inside them, I don't know. We have friggin' RFID chips inside our consumer electronics, yet we don't have them on hospital patients?

For the Spalding family, Lynne's boyfriend and other friends, to have to consider that her last hours on earth were spent alone inside the cold and forbidding environment of a hospital stairwell, possibly trying to make someone, anyone, aware of how she was trapped inside of said stairwell, with her eventually succumbing to dehydration - well, there simply are no words.

[get the red out]

1. That's heartbreaking

I can't imagine being her family.

[El_Johns]

2. "hysteria". I can just see the staff discussing it. "Hysteria" is a word widely used to minimize &

neutralize the legitimate concerns of others - particularly less powerful others.

The rich are never subject to "hysteria".

[laundry_queen]

24. so true. nt

[uppityperson]

3. wtf?

[arthritisR_US]

4. +1. nt

[Brickbat]

5. Fuck GPS bracelets -- staff the hospital properly and give people real care.

[sorefeet]

6. If they only had more profits

they could afford gps bracelets. Right now they probably got a 100 million dollar law suit to worry about. And will someone be held accountable besides the little person following chickenshit policy.

[GeorgeGist]

7. Not so fast friend ...

Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi has acknowledged that his deputies, who provide security at the hospital, bungled a subsequent search for Spalding and never checked the stairwell where her body was finally found Oct. 8. She had died several days earlier of dehydration and liver problems related to alcoholism, an autopsy found.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-S-F-General-lost-track-of-Lynne-Spalding-5122645.php

[truedelphi]

11. However, in the same report you cite -

Last edited Fri Jan 10, 2014, 06:49 PM - Edit history (1)

Which I found extremely important and informative, it sounds like the police were mis-lead as to how likely it was that she was really missing. Perhaps the police thought she had been discharged?

In any case, someone dropped the ball.

Om edit - Oops! It seems as I re-read your link, it was the deputies who were conferring with each other and inflating the idea that patient had checked herself out.

[matt819]

8. You pay them crap, they give crap in return

Why should any of these employees care, apart from their own sense of decency and humanity. Their corporations don't give a shit about them, why should they give anything extra?

As for gps or other such procedures, they are only as good as the people putting them into place. I went to the doctor the other day. The nurse saw me first and verified my name and dob, last four of ssn, and the purpose of my visit. They've been doing this for years with surgical procedures, but I think it's relatively new for routine office visits. My point is that she went through this routine rotely, a I couldn't help but wonder at the time whether she would have taken note if my information was wrong. It's possible this attitude - rules, rote, thousands of patients, etc., etc. - was responsible for the failure to search properly and thoroughly.

Or maybe it's as simple as, people just don't give a damn anymore.

[truedelphi]

13. My experiences as private duty

Nursing assistant, in CAlif. hospitals quite often, 1989 to 1994 was quite good. Sure the staff sometimes forgot a food order, but that was about the extent of the mishaps.

From, 1994 to 1996, the situation was more mediocre.

From 1996 on, FowGEDabout it. At times it almost seemed like the hospital was out to get the patient. On one occasion in 2001, I had to call a friend who was a nurse to have her deliver sanitary bandages for use on my patient - Marin General's bandages were so old they could no longer be considered sterile.

Hospital nursing assistants were expected to handle equipment and do various procedures that had previously been the purview of trained LVN's and RN's. The nurses who were available were often traveling nurses, who were scheduled to work in in Oakland two days a week, San Francisco one day, and Marin County a fifth day. They didn't know even the basics of where things were -which when someone codes, is extremely important information to have. And as a traveling nurse, I imagine there is little ability to bond with a patient.

[dionysus]

9. how can there be a stairwell no one goes through in weeks? is that common?

[RC]

10. One word: Elevators

Hospital staff is over worked. The only time they can rest a bit, is when waiting for and riding in the elevator.

[Freddie]

12. I worked in a hospital

For security reasons we were not allowed to use the stairs, only elevators.

[dionysus]

16. yeah, but, don't you think, if there was a missing patient alert, they'd have checked them?

[Warpy]

28. We had alarms on our stairwells that opened onto the units.

because years before I worked there, a patient had gone out the stairwell, onto the roof, and jumped off. Unalarmed stairwells were near the elevators and in frequent use by excercisers.

Most of the alarms were triggered by patients and family members who thought they could smoke in a stairwell.

It seems a little odd that no one used that stairwell for 17 days. It doesn't seem odd that the hospital was so short staffed that people just didn't have the time to search the stairwells.

I'm a little surprised the woman's family didn't do it, or that they didn't file a missing person report with the cops.

[jberryhill]

14. If it is a fire evacuation route....

Some buildings have stairs which aren't used as a matter of course, and are a fire evacuation route. Typically, the doors to them lock when they are closed, and the only way out is through a door at the bottom that trips an alarm.

Especially in a hospital, you don't want people wandering from floor to floor, or coming and going to any floor except by an elevator lobby which is a single point of access to the floor.

[dionysus]

15. thanks for the explanation.

[Jesus Malverde]

30. These were alarmed stairwells that were open to the air, in the center of the building

What hasn't been said if she smoked cigarettes. It's possible, the smoking policy implemented by UCSF contributed to her death.

If she snuck outside to smoke and got locked out, no one could hear her knocking.

[Gormy Cuss]

17. She also had a sitter assigned to her because she kept trying to get out of the bed.

Last edited Fri Jan 10, 2014, 10:00 PM - Edit history (1)

San Francisco General Hospital was supposed to be keeping a round-the-clock watch on the patient who disappeared and was later found dead in a stairwell at the medical center, but there was no monitor on duty when the woman walked away, the family's attorney said Tuesday.

The hospital had assigned a monitor to Lynne Spalding after staff members disconnected an alarm from a bed that was supposed to sound when the 57-year-old San Francisco woman tried to leave, said the attorney, Haig Harris, citing accounts from San Francisco General officials. The officials told Spalding's family that the alarm had been disabled because she was repeatedly getting out of her bed, Harris said.

The monitor was not with Spalding when she walked away the morning of Sept. 21...

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-S-F-General-lost-track-of-Lynne-Spalding-5122645.php

Lots of things went wrong here.

[truedelphi]

18. Human beings who are "sitters" are usually paid decent money to do the job

And so both a mechanical monitor and human sitter proved to be lacking in their fulfilling the intended purpose.

[elehhhhna]

26. wtf? they discon'd the alarm b/c it worked?

wow

this understaffing shit is getting deadly

The CFO IS the death panel

[Octafish]

19. Overworked and under-staffed is one thing...

...condescension towards the patient is another thing.

Hope some careers end at San Francisco General. No excuse for not caring in that line of work.

[truedelphi]

21. In many cases the people

With experience and who care have long ago been eliminated. At least that seems to be the case in California.

Much cheaper and easier for Hospital Administrators to hire an agency that provides traveling nurses, who are on the floor of a hospital in San Jose on Monday, and on the floor of a hospital in Oakland on Tuesday. If that means that when someone "codes" and the traveling nurse has no idea where the equipment is, as she or he has only been on that hospital floor for three hours, well, too bad.

Sure occasionally there are lawsuits, but the hospital realizes its goal of savings on the providing of benefits, and will not be troubled by employees who start realizing that the hospital is not operating in accordance with state law, or common sense.

Just this week, going through a "yearly roundup" of obituaries was the sad tale of a baby boy, born to people here in Lake County, Calif. They traveled down to SF Bay area to have a bone marrow transplant for their baby boy. Their 22 month old daughter provided the marrow for the younger infant. The operation was a success, but the baby boy died of Legionnaires.

Well the baby boy contracted Legionnaires from either Univ Of Calif. Hospital, in San Francisco, or Children's Hospital! Both places apparently tested positive for Legionnaires. Including the Operating Theater, at which the bone marrow transplant procedure was performed!

[Octafish]

29. Heartbreaking...Completely heartbreaking.

The child lost his life because the hospitals failed to maintain a clean environment -- something only trained and monitored staff can provide.

About 8 years ago, my neighbor went under the knife to reduce the pain from a herniated disc. The guy was a veteran of World War II, brave as all get out, served as air crew for a PBY Catalina flying boat in the Pacific and Atlantic. He loved his family and community, completely.

He picked up an infection from his stay. I believe it happened in surgery, from the complications the guy suffered. He needed two more operations. He was never the same, lived in constant agony which kept him from daily walks. He passed about two years later. He was a good a man as this world ever knows.

I had been hospitalized in the same facility -- a regional hospital in Detroit -- for about a week a year or two prior to my friend, where I was treated for pneumonia. I was astounded to find dirt and grime in the room I stayed, on the hospital bed I lay, and throughout the facility. If it was visible, I could only imagine what was in the air and on the surfaces that no one could see. And no one I recall cleaning up.

This was a shock to me. I'd worked as an orderly in two hospitals as a young person in the mid- and late-70s. At one, I worked in ER helping move patients, take vital signs, hold babies steady when papooses for stitches as well as steam cleaned each cart and bed once a week; the other I helped clean the operating room in the evening. At both, we were trained and monitored. A physician served as head of the process. He and the head of the hospital's cleaning crew used a device that would measure the static on the OR floor to determine how many bacteria remained after we went through. If there was something we missed, they would know it and we would re-do the room, from the lights, ceiling and walls, to the bed and floor. Every day.

Hospitals, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, lab staff, therapists, dietary, kitchen, nurse's aids, orderlies, housekeeping, and every paper pusher in the place is supposed to know how to maintain a healthy hospital. Yet the driver in care today is money. Keeping costs down is more important than maintaining a safe environment.

I know that you, truedelphi, and I take the opposite approach. We believe each life represents an infinity of promise and possibility. That is why we -- and all the health care professionals from the time of Hippocrates to the volunteer Candy Striper helping out in gift shop -- do all we can to preserve and protect life. Property, things and profit have no room in the health care "algorithm," yet they rule health, and peace and prosperity, in our times today.

[shenmue]

20. This is just awful

[Gravitycollapse]

22. I guess I'll be the only one here to not argue "over-worked, under-paid."

Which sounds like a bullshit excuse to write off what is clearly a systemic failure of an entire hospital to perform simple security checks and monitor at-risk patients.

Not only should the staff have checked the fire-escapes when a patient was reported missing, they should be checking the fire escapes every day. No portion of the hospital should go completely unobserved for more than a few hours. Who's responsible for security at this hospital? They should be looking for another job. Hopefully one with less responsibility. And all of the doctors and/or nurses who mockingly emailed about the situation should be fired for misconduct.

[FarCenter]

23. Fire exit stairwell

The stairwell is a fire exit that has an alarm on it, and is locked from the outside and exits onto hospital grounds.

This type of stairwell has doors that are locked from the inside, except for the one that leads outside. That is so you can't deviate from the escape route back into the building. Once inside, you have to go to the ground floor and out the alarmed exit door.

They are never used routinely, since blocking a door to a floor open is a severe fire code infraction.

In a sprawling, multi-story structure like the hospital, there would be a fair number of these.

[elehhhhna]

27. yep, and when you lose a wandering patient, they should be checked

as SOP

[REP]

25. As an accomplished hospital ninja, I can tell you they suck at finding people

The last time I was incarcerated at the hospital (pastuerella infection plus variant coronavirus; they thought I might die or lose my hand), I managed to leave my room numerous times without notice. The one time they did notice - because I told someone I was going to get something from my car - they did have Security looking for me, and despite me telling them that my bright red car was parked in front of the ER, nope - didn't find me.

What was I getting from my car? Tissues. I could not get anyone to bring me a freaking box of tissues and I had a horrible URI that was hard enough to deal with with just one hand being usuable, let alone nothing to blow my nose on.