Hospital Sued Over Abandoned ER Patient

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

Six days after a patient died after being literally abandoned in the emergency room of the WellSpan York Hospital, the hospital's president wrote to his family assuring them the patient had received prompt and approriate care.
In fact the patient sat slumped over in a wheel chair for more than two hours before he was finally found unresponsive.
Those facts were spelled out in a 49-page suit filed in York Common Pleas Court this week.
The malpractice and wrongful death action was filed for that patient, 72-year-old Terry L. Odom and his son, Terry R. Murray.
According to the suit, Odom was brought to the hospital by ambulance at 10 a.m.on Aug. 16, 2019 but failed to get any serious medical attention till 12:25, when he was found unresponsive. He could not be revived and was pronounced dead at 1:31 p.m.
Citing the "shocking and appalling abandonment" of Odoms, the suit states that hospital staffers passed his wheelchair at least a dozen times without even looking at him.
He had been placed in the emergency department waiting room at 10:25 a.m. without any detailed examination.
The nurse, serving both as a pivot nurse and triage nurse, never even got out of her seat to look at the patient.
Citing the chronic understaffing in the hospital's emergency room, the suit charges that hospital officials placed profits over patient safety thus leading to a preventable death.
The death was "due to the outrageous and recklesss actions of WellSpan," the complaint states adding that WellSpan knew for at least a year that the emergency department was "dangerously understaffed."
The suit states that when Odoms arrived at the hospital the ambulance crew informed hospital staffers that the patient had been placed on oxygen because of dangerously low oxygen saturation levels.
The oxygen was removed and never replaced.
Sometime before 12:25 a.m. he suffered a cardio respiratory event, but not before surveillance cameras showed him stretching out his arms in a plea for help.
When he was finally discovered slumped over in a wheelchair "He was right where they had put him but incapacitated and unable to respond." By then the emergency room staff had made a notation in his record LWBS (Left Without Being Seen).
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