As a previous employee of this company, I am not at all surprised about what happened. I am terribly sad for the Vance family however.
I cannot tell you how many time that ER had triaged patients badly. The bulk of the population there is spanish speaking patients. They do not even have a full time interpreter on site. They rely on a person over the phone to help translate. The employees are treated like cattle there. An employee (any time, DR, RN, secretary) is not allowed to leave the hospital at any time during thier shift. Not even on lunch or breaks. The cafeteria is not open after 7 pm, so anyone who works 3rd shift is SOL. There is significant evidence of managers having affairs with thier subordinates, on hospital time, and property. They terminate employess for unjust causes. I remember a nurse who was following protocol, but because a patient felt she was getting treated poorly, or differently, she complained, and said nurse was fired. There are not enough nurses to handle the staff that comes in, not enough supplies. At night there is virtually no supervisors available. There is one nursing sup. for the entire hospital, and often times she is unavailable, or unable to assist in some important ways, liking getting drugs from the pharmacy. I remember a situation where a pt came in to have a baby, IL recently starting testing EVERY mother for HIV prior to delivery, if no results were available by her Dr. This particular patient tested positve. We were all shocked, as this was new territory for us. The horrible part, was the hospital didnt even have the drug therapy available to help this mother or her baby. We may have been able to prevent the disease from spreading to the child if we had the AZT available. What is the use testing, if we are not able to help them.
There was another case where a baby was born with some problems. He needed blood, ASAP+ the blood bank didnt even have the right kind of blood for a newborn. The said it would take close to 4 hours for the kind the dr wanted. We had to settle for something that wasnt what the dr wanted, but would work, then it still took them over 25 minutes to have the blood ready. This hospital is supposed to be a level 2 trauma center, but its employees were never given the proper tools to really make a difference when it really matters.