Horrifying Hospital Failure
The callousness amounting to negligence that may have contributed to the death of a psychiatric patient at Kings County Hospital has prompted the justified firing of six employees - including the head of the psychiatric unit and the hospital's security director.

The inaction on the part of the other four employees, as captured on video cameras in the emergency room, led Mayor Bloomberg to say, "Horrified is much too nice a word" to describe his reaction.

Just as telling was the fact that Teamsters Local 237 President Greg Floyd, who represents hospital security personnel, declined to comment. Normally union leaders see it as their institutional role to stand up for members in trouble. In this instance, Mr. Floyd may have realized that the lack of response by the employees, and one particularly cringe-inducing moment when an employee poked the stricken woman, Esmin Green, with her foot in what seems to have been the sole initial attempt to determine her condition, was beyond defending. To stand up for them would have reflected badly on other security personnel who perform their duties conscientiously.

The incident, which culminated in Ms. Green's death June 19, came at a time when the city was defending a lawsuit brought by mental health advocates and the New York Civil Liberties Union which contended, among other claims, that psychiatric patients at Kings County were subject to abuse and neglect on the part of hospital staff.

Last week, the Health and Hospitals Corporation agreed to increase the frequency of monitoring of psych patients at Kings County and to document what is found during those checks in a signed, sworn log. The latter step was agreed to because hospital records showed two false entries, indicating that Ms. Green had gone to the bathroom and was "sitting quietly in the waiting area" during a period when the video cameras showed her collapsed on the floor. Those false entries will be prime exhibits in the likely wrongful death suit that will be filed by Ms. Green's family, as well as a potential criminal prosecution.

An attorney for the advocates who brought the lawsuit told the New York Times, "The reason why this woman died the way she did was that there is a culture of indifference that permeates every aspect of KCHC psychiatric care, nothing short of that."

This may be too sweeping a generalization. But the lack of help that was given to Ms. Green for roughly an hour after she collapsed showed a jaded lack of humanity on the part of staff that is simply intolerable. Working with psychiatric patients can sometimes be trying, and there are times when they will act out. But those hired to provide patient care and security who fail to assist someone convulsing on the hospital floor have abdicated not only their job duties but their sense of decency.

The fact that Ms. Green had been in the psychiatric emergency room for nearly 24 hours after she was admitted before she collapsed - which HHC said was the consequence of a shortage of psychiatric beds - suggests failures higher up in the system that, while less overtly disturbing, are equally damning.