Untreated Olive View patient died of a heart attack

An L.A. County coroner’s spokesman confirmed Tuesday that a 33-year-old man who collapsed and died last month after waiting more than three hours at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center to be treated for chest pains had had a heart attack.

The county-run hospital in Sylmar had failed to administer a simple test to check whether Christopher Jones was having a heart attack when he walked into the emergency room Oct. 28.

Within days of Jones’ death, the county Department of Health Services announced that it was taking steps to fire the triage nurse responsible for evaluating Jones. State investigators are continuing to review the case to determine whether the hospital provided adequate treatment.

Craig Harvey, operations chief for the county coroner’s office, said Jones died from a blood clot and coronary heart disease. Pathologists also found that he had an enlarged heart.

Medical records show that Jones told a triage nurse that he had arm pain, chest pain and chills. His vital signs were taken but he was never given an electrocardiogram, a test used to diagnose heart attacks.

The American College of Cardiology strongly advises hospitals to administer an EKG within 10 minutes of a patient’s arrival at an emergency department if he or she complains of chest pain or has other symptoms associated with a heart attack. If an EKG does not diagnose a heart attack but the symptoms continue, the college advises hospitals to continue administering the test every 15 to 30 minutes.

“They could have helped him,” said Jones’ sister, Sheryl. “We’re upset. He died for nothing because they didn’t want to help him. And this shouldn’t happen to anyone.”

Dr. Robert Splawn, the county’s senior medical director of health services, said the death has prompted Olive View to launch an extensive retraining of nurses and doctors on triage policy. He said the hospital also is revamping the way it assesses ER patients with chest pain.

“It’s very unfortunate that this happened to the patient and to the family,” Splawn said.

Dr. Susan Wiegers, director of the clinical echocardiography lab at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, said Olive View’s staff could have given Jones clot-busting drugs or performed a procedure to unblock the artery had they known he had a blood clot. But she cautioned that EKGs do not always identify a heart attack even if a patient is experiencing one.

“It’s hard to know if they did the EKG whether it would have looked normal or not,” she said. “The difficulty is that there are a thousand things that cause chest pains, particularly in people that young.”

Wiegers, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, said mistakes are all but inevitable as emergency departments continue to become more crowded with uninsured patients seeking treatment.

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jack.leonard@latimes.com