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Fred_Flintstone

Good, informative article. As a retired nurse, I would be a liar or a coward if I made the statements that puppy made. If I have "seen travesties of justice" in the hospitals I worked and did not speak up, then I have deserted my patients and my ethics as a nurse. Nurses and doctors have to be part of the solution and not sit back and point fingers. Leaving foreign objects in a patient or removing a healthy organ, that's on doctors. Bed sores, UTIs and other line infections, that's on nurses. Reporting these events, that's on administration.

I thought he was going to lead the charge to fix UMC and get it affiliated with a teaching and research organization. Has he given up on that already?

Unless poker starts using a ball, it's not a sport.

"The intake coordinator, who had assessed the suicide risk, said the social worker was to follow up with the physician and arrange transportation to the psychiatric hospital, the investigation found. The intake coordinator said that because of the suicide risk she "assumed the facility would watch the patient closely," the report said."

This intake coordinator is employed by the psych hospital. Did she actually communicate this risk to hospital staff??? say "was to follow up..." and "assumed" does not say that she actually communicated.

"But neither the social worker nor the case manager read the intake assessment."

"MountainView's medical records document no evidence that a self-harm risk assessment was completed by the emergency room staff..."

No wonder they didn't read it. It wasn't in the patient's chart!

The problem here is that the psychiatric hospital's intake coordinator did not do her job well. You don't show up in the ER and assess that a patient is suicidal and NOT tell the doctors and nurses. You have to tell them AND write it in the patients chart which she also apparently did not do.

So much of this story bashes Mountainview and not enough focuses on the poor performance of the psych hospital employee.

Mountainview is not a psychiatric hospital and hospital ERs are not the appropriate place for psychiatric patients to be held. The docs and nurses at that ER are trained to take care of heart attacks, strokes, trauma and other physical ailments. I agree there was some breakdown of communication, but with all the news about our over-crowded emergency rooms during the last few years, is it really surprising that paperwork wasn't completed very quickly? How many ER patients were there that day? The system is distressed and the needs of psychiatric patients will never be adequately addressed in ERs.