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Videos released of two hospitals ignoring dying women

Quality Improvement Monitor, July 4, 2008

The video of a woman who died after writhing in pain for 45 minutes on the floor of an emergency room (ER) lobby was anonymously sent this week to the Los Angeles Times, which has posted the footage on its Web site. The newspaper recieved the video the same week that another video was released showing a woman in a Brooklyn ER waiting room dying as staff and other patients ignored her.

Edith Isabel Rodriguez died in May 2007 in the lobby of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Los Angeles after falling to the floor in severe pain. For 45 minutes, staff walked by and janitors mopped around, but no one came to help. Her boyfriend called 911 from a pay phone outside to no avail, according to the Times.

Esmin Green had waited in the physiciatric ER waiting room of Brooklyn's Kings County Hospital  for almost 24 hours when she slipped from her chair onto the floor. She lay there for more than an hour before someone in the waiting room notified a staff member, who tapped her with her foot to awaken her.

"Many times, people . . . think, 'If I keel over, I'm in a hospital, people will take care of me,' " Michael Shapiro, an expert in bioethics at the USC Gould School of Law, told the Times. He said he thinks such incidents happen "more often than people think," the paper reported.

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