Video Footage of Hospital Death Leads to Reforms
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City hospital officials agreed in court yesterday to implement reforms at a psychiatric ward where surveillance footage captured a woman falling from her chair, writhing on the floor, and dying as workers failed to help for more than an hour.
Esmin Green, 49, had been waiting in the emergency room at the city-owned Kings County Hospital Center for nearly 24 hours when she toppled from her seat at 5:32 a.m. on June 19.
She was dead by 6:35, when someone on the medical staff, flagged down by a person in the waiting room, finally approached, nudged Green with her foot, and gently prodded her shoulder, as if to wake her.
Until the staffer’s appearance, Green’s collapse barely caused a ripple. Other patients waiting a few feet away didn’t react. Security guards and a member of the Brooklyn hospital’s staff appeared to notice her prone body at least three times but made no visible attempt to see if she needed help.
One guard didn’t even leave his chair, rolling it around a corner to stare at the body, then rolling away a few moments later.
Green had been involuntarily committed the previous morning.
The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the hospital, said six people have been fired as a result of the incident, including security personnel and members of the medical staff.
The psychiatric unit at Kings County Hospital had already been a subject of complaints by advocates for the mentally ill. The Department of Justice began investigating allegations of patient mistreatment this spring.
A state agency, the New York State Mental Hygiene Legal Service, and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit a year ago, calling the psychiatric center “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference, and danger.”
Both sides in the dispute went before a federal judge yesterday to jointly file papers in which the hospital system agreed to a series of reforms. Under the agreement, patients in the waiting room will now be checked every 15 minutes.
Over the next four months, the hospital will attempt to shorten the median waiting time to around 10 hours.
