Letter in Response to Hospital Negligence
Letter in Response to Hospital Negligence
This letter is in response to your communication dated November 21, 2001. The review you mentioned on your letter of the medical record of my mother, appears to be flawed and biased. In very few cases does the E.R. have the luxury of a patient arriving within minutes of the onset of an acute cerebro-vascular event (stroke). My mother arrived at the E.R. within twenty minutes of the onset of the symptoms. She was an ideal candidate for immediate use of intravenous T.P.A.
If the E.R. physician had any concerns about the possibility of rectal bleeding due to a history of “recent” surgery, those concerns should have been totally dispelled as soon as I was consulted. I am the Chief of Surgery I was one of the surgeons who participated in the removal of a rectal polyp, which occurred months prior to this incident not two to three weeks as your letter proclaims. If an attending surgeon informs your resident of this fact, and requests that T.P.A. be administered intravenously, there should not have been hesitation in the timing of the infusion of this medication.
This emergency room physician had been tasked to find as many cases as possible for intra-arterial T.P.A., because your Hospital was doing a study on this procedure. He was frantically paging the ‘team,’ and received no response to his queries. The ‘team’ was in the Hospital performing another procedure and had disconnected or turned off their pagers. A member of my family, my sister, was insisting that there should be no delay in administering the T.P.A., but her frantic requests were completely ignored; in fact, a member of the E.R. team threatened that if my sister continued to insist on this, nothing would be done for my mother. Six hours later, by the time my mother was taken to the cath-lab to receive the intra-arterial drug, the golden period to dissolve the clot had passed, and the procedure was just an exercise in futility.
My family and I will never be able to forget the fact that my mother’s stroke could have been reversed, or at the least reduced in severity had the drug been administered within that crucial period of the first arrival at your E.R.
I do agree with one item your letter, and that is that the decision to withhold and approve...