Dying of hospital indifference syndrome

When he saw The Times’ story about the woman who died on the floor of the King-Harbor hospital emergency room while staffers ignored her pleas for help, Eric Johnson was more relieved than shocked.

The 47-year-old South Los Angeles man counted himself lucky that his own recent visit to King-Harbor hospital hadn’t ended the same way.

Johnson, in excruciating pain, was told by his doctor on the morning of May 11 to go immediately to King-Harbor for an ultrasound test. His doctor suspected he had kidney stones. Johnson says he arrived at the urgent care unit at 11:30 a.m. By his account, it took two hours before they took his temperature, two more hours for a urine test, and two more hours for a blood test.

All the while, he was in terrible pain and noticed that other patients arrived after him and were treated ahead of him.

“I understand they’ve got more serious cases they have to take ahead of me,” he said, but as the hours wore on with no word on when he might see a doctor, he began asking periodically when he might finally get some attention.

“I’m not a selfish person, but I said, ‘Hey, I’m in a lot of pain here.’ ”

Johnson said he has no health insurance for the first time in his adult life after losing a job because of a stroke. It was his first visit to the notoriously troubled King-Harbor hospital despite growing up in the area.

Nine hours after arriving, he said, he was given a painkiller. When it began to wear off and there was still no indication when he might see a doctor, he gave up and left. In all, he had been at the hospital for 11 hours and never got the test his doctor had sent him for. He’s now being treated at a clinic.

Johnson’s condition was not nearly as serious as that of Edith Isabel Rodriguez, who died two days earlier under circumstances shocking even for this hospital, which used to be called King/Drew. But the two stories together make me wonder whether, despite the forced reforms and improvement at the hospital, a poisoned culture still exists.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors met in closed session Tuesday to discuss the incident with Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen and health services chief Dr. Bruce Chernof. Janssen has said the responsibility lies with a single nurse who has already resigned, and that this latest scandal isn’t a sign of a systemic problem.

Is he kidding?

If a woman arrives at a hospital with a gallstone problem and falls out of a wheelchair twice, is told by an ER nurse to get up, lies on the ground while her frantic boyfriend calls 911 when no one will help, writhes in pain for 45 minutes while a janitor sweeps around her and police begin to arrest her on a warrant, then dies a horrible death from an apparent perforated bowel after several medical staffers sit back as if everything’s fine, I’d say the problem is not only systemic, but it might be time to consider locking all the doors and calling in an exorcist.

It’s not as if this happened in a vacuum.

The hospital lost its federal funding after damning Times stories in 2004 by Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, among others, about lapses that led to patients’ deaths. It lost its accreditation. It disciplined more than 500 employees. It paid millions of tax dollars to settle negligence cases. It changed management.

If, after all that, employees can be so indifferent to a patient in distress, I don’t know what to do but show them the door and remind everyone else what the mission is. I’d suggest daily recitation of passages from the modernized Hippocratic oath:

“I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

“I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability.”

Chernof agreed that the Rodriguez incident, which he saw on videotape, was “unbelievable and not acceptable.”

But when we talked Tuesday, he insisted that significant improvements have been made and will continue.

“When you’re trying to change the behavior and culture of 1,200 employees, and that culture has been set over a long time,” Chernof said, “it doesn’t happen overnight.”

Overnight?

It’s been years, and patients shouldn’t have to keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

steve.lopez@latimes.com