Re: Doctors Torture and Kill Asthmatic Child

The bastards should all be shot!

nimue wrote:

These doctors and nurses actually tortured and killed her nine years ago --
the court case has just been completed. The doctors and nurses who did this
are all still working at Woodhull which, I have heard, is one of the
shittiest hospitals in all NYC. I don't understand why they would tie her to
the bed, why they wouldn't sedate her before intubating her, and why they
wouldn't let her parents in the room. I wonder where those missing medical
records went, too. Hmmmmmm.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/07/09/2007-07-09_our_girl_died_and_no_one_has_paid_a_pric-1.html

Our girl died and no one has paid a price
Like thousands of other children in our city, 10-year-old Anna Gloria Rivera
had learned to cope with the asthma attacks that often racked her slender
body. When a severe bout struck her around 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 21, 1998,
Anna's parents called 911 and an ambulance rushed her to city-owned Woodhull
Hospital in Brooklyn.

Four and a half hours later, the girl was dead in the hospital's emergency
room - not from asthma but from medical care so horribly botched it should
more properly be called torture.

A Brooklyn Supreme Court jury two weeks ago awarded $3.5million to Frances
and Abel Rivera, Anna's parents, for what Woodhull staff did to their
daughter that day.

But amazingly, in a final insult to her parents, nearly nine years later,
all of the Woodhull nurses and doctors found negligent are still working at
the hospital.

The jury was told of a series of blunders and missteps in Anna's last
painful hours.

Over an eight-week period, they heard how:

a.. Doctors and nurses put a breathing tube down the girl's throat without
giving her proper sedatives.

a.. Her hands and feet were tied to her bed.

a.. After leaving her bucking and screaming for at least an hour, they
improperly pulled out and reinserted her endotracheal tube, then pumped so
much air into her lungs that they burst.

a.. Finally, after she became unresponsive, they administered huge
overdoses of an adrenaline drug to keep her heart beating.
A state Health Department investigation of the girl's death in April 1999
also concluded that Woodhull had failed to meet "generally acceptable
standards of professional practice" in its treatment of the girl.

One of the doctors found most liable in the civil trial was Dr. Adedokun
Akinyooye. The jury's written verdict assigned him 35% blame in the girl's
death for departing "from good and accepted medical practice ... by pulling
the endotracheal breathing tube completely out, instead of simply
readjusting it."

Akinyooye, an attending physician in Woodhull's pediatrics department,
testified on the stand that the hospital's "standard of care" permitted the
intubation of children as young as 8. But under questioning from Bonita
Zelman, the attorney for the Rivera family, he said he didn't "remember
specifically what is in the [hospital] protocol."

Akinyooye's direct supervisors and several nurses and technicians
acknowledged in their testimony that they also didn't know if Woodhull had
written procedures for intubating children with severe asthma attacks at the
time of Anna's death - despite years of a childhood asthma epidemic in poor
neighborhoods.

Reached by telephone last week, Akinyooye angrily refused to talk about the
Rivera case.

"Don't call me. Talk to the hospital," he said, hanging up.

Jurors in the case also found the hospital and its staff 40% responsible for
the girl's death, and assigned 5% culpability each to Dr. Maurice Wright,
the chairman of emergency medicine, and Dr. Samuel Agyare, the director of
pediatric emergency medicine, for their failure to ensure hospital staff
followed "acceptable practices."

"This is a tragic situation, and our sympathies go out to the family, as
they did when this happened nine years ago," Woodhull spokeswoman Lynn
Schulman said. "We are disappointed [with the verdict] and will let the
lawyers decide on next steps."

The trial record, however, suggests that even Woodhull's expressions of
sympathy are open to question.

Abel Rivera, for example, testified that while his daughter was thrashing in
pain in her bed in the emergency room that morning, hospital staff refused
to allow him or his wife into the room to comfort her and gave them no
information about her condition. Once she died, no doctor appeared to talk
to them. Instead, hospital staff called security guards to remove the
distraught father from the hospital when he demanded some explanation.

"We put our child in their hands and they tied her to a bed," Rivera said
yesterday. "I cried watching her struggle from side to side. You don't even
treat an animal like that, yet these people are still working there."

A nurse who was in the room when Anna died testified that while the girl's
body was still on the bed, officials from the hospital's risk management
unit suddenly appeared and began scooping up X-rays and medical charts -
several of which were never found afterward.

The girl, who had astounded her teachers at Public School 250 with five
years of perfect attendance despite her severe asthma condition, did not
survive five hours at Woodhull.

The doctors who failed her so horrendously, well, they're all doing just
fine - and now city taxpayers and insurance companies will pay the tab.

--
nimue

"Let your freak-flag fly, and if someone doesn't get you, move on."
Drew Barrymore

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