TROUBL

Esmin Elizabeth Green, a 49-year-old resident of Brooklyn, New York, was a native of Jamaica, where her six children still lived. She worked hard as a caretaker for the elderly and at a local daycare, and She spent a lot of time at the Jesus Is Lord Church in Canarsie. This devoted Christian and Brooklyn community member had been experiencing anxiety attacks since January and had been hospitalized several times for psychiatric treatment over the past months. On June 18, she experienced another attack and was involuntarily committed to the care of King County Hospital psychiatric ward with symptoms of “agitation and psychosis,” according to city officials quoted on MSNBC.

Once committed, Ms. Green was forced to wait in the Emergency Room for almost 24 hours before, around 5:30 am on June 19,she collapsed. She fell out of her chair, face-first, and onto another chair, writhing in pain. Eventually, Ms. Green was still, passing away from as-yet unknown reasons. She was left on the floor, her death unnoticed, for a full hour while security guards occasionally glanced in and walked away, other patients sitting nearby and ignoring her body. When someone finally noticed her condition and paid it the attention it deserved, a medical crew entered the ER’s waiting room and attempted to revive her, but since she had been dead for around half an hour already, the attempts were unsuccessful. Her death was duly reported on June 20, along with her medical records, which stated that at 6:02 a.m., Ms. Green was “awake, up and about,” and at 6:20 a.m., she was sitting quietly in the waiting room.

Unfortunately for the Kings County psychiatric staff, the fact that Ms. Green was face down and motionless on the floor at both of these times was proved by a surveillance video of the incident, which made its way into the media almost a week and a half after the incident occurred. The video is available online. It is shocking and upsetting to watch. Ms. Green is shown falling onto the floor, wriggling around in obvious pain, and further shows hospital employees and other patients ignoring her for over an hour.

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation revealed as of June 20, three staff members who were present at the time of Ms. Green’s death were fired and three others suspended with union-required trials pending. These actions are promising, as is the impending settlement of a lawsuit against Kings County Hospital, contingent upon the facility’s promise of monitoring patients in its emergency waiting room every fifteen minutes. What is less promising—in fact, what is outright terrifying –about the situation is the lawsuit in question, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others, went into effect a full year ago and cited that at the time, the hospital’s psychiatric center was a “chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.” If Ms. Green’s case is any testament, no improvements had been made over the course of that year. Another term of the settlement is a planned reduction in the median patient waiting room time to 10 to 13 hours. Yes, that’s right, it will be reduced to half a day’s wait for treatment! And, worse still, these measures are expected to go into effect in four months. Not immediately. Four months from now.

A quick search on the New York Times from the July 2 article about Ms. Green’s death reveals that complaints have been leveled against King’s County hospital before. A November 28, 1998 article mentions a patient being sent home from a CAT scan with blood pooling in his brain, a woman in childbirth neglected so long that she needed a blood transfusion, and numerous patients sent home without proper treatment. What’s even more chilling is that the article quotes George M. Proctor, the hospital’s active chief in1998, as saying that despite these issues, ”I think that, over all, the quality of the emergency care we provide is excellent.” Excellence rarely involves letting patients go improperly treated, much less dying while waiting over a day for treatment. And while arguments could be made here for more medical professionals and better pay for the ones that already exist, or for better funding for public hospitals, the root of the issue lies in another statement in the same article from 1998: “Kings County Hospital … serves many poor people in Brooklyn.”

Ms. Green, who was undoubtedly a hard worker, a devout Christian, and a mother of six, was nonetheless a poor, black, mentally unstable person. She may have been in the one place where help should have been easy to obtain - the waiting room of a hospital’s psychiatric ward - but the truth is that even there, the poor, people of minority status, and the mentally ill are all marginalized groups in our country. And apparently, when one person embodies all of those things, even in the arms of those who should help her, she can be marginalized unto death.