Hospital charged with murder.
While waiting two hours in a Lake County Ill hospital complaining of severe pain, Beatrice (ed.–previously i wrote “beverly”) Vance died of a heart attack. This after she clearly reported symptoms that indicated that a heart attack was imminent (ed. — previously “eminent” doh!). Officials charged the hospital staff with murder, and in an interview with NPR’s Farai Chideya one of them noted that Vance’s race likely played a role. Farai talked to me about it afterwards. One of the things I’ve been reiterating to my black politics class is that care is a political resource. As it is finite, people make decisions–who gets it? who doesn’t? When we’re talking about something like a hospital, the allocation of care becomes political, racial, and in this case, deadly.
September 27th, 2006 at 5:51 am
What’s frightning is that Sis. Vance daughter was a LPN and her cry felled on death ear.Imagine the number’s that we don’t hear about .Health care is about choices ,institutional ,who gets it,personal ,what lifestyle i.e. what we eat,and how we manage stress At the end of the day we must organize around are rights.
September 27th, 2006 at 7:07 am
It is sad that even though it is the law that everyone is given care, there appears to be no real urgency to enforce it, unless someone dies. I hope that this sends a message to the hospital and their staff. We as patients need to know our rights as well. Below is an excerpt from an abc news article on Sept. 19th.
“In this specific situation, the American Heart Association recommends that patients suffering from an apparent heart attack be put on cardiac monitoring immediately and that they be given an electrocardiogram within 10 minutes of their arrival.
The coroner said in Vance’s case, none of that happened.”
I am sure there are many cases that we do not hear about. It is very important that more cases like this are investigated and brought to justice because this is serious business. We look to doctors and hospitals to take care of us in our time of need. When you are dying, you do not have time to go through political red tape when you get to the ER, be it racial or anything else.
September 27th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
It seems like everyone I know has a nightmare story about waiting for hours in the emergency room with some horrible thing going wrong. This seems systemic. The worst case I know of personally involves a white software millionaire, who spent several hours waiting in an emergency room, before finally being seen, and rushed into an emergency appendectomy.
I’m curious how the victim’s race changed her care. Was this a matter of not taking her complaint seriously because she was black? Or because she was a woman? Or because she didn’t fit the profile for having a heart attack? Was there an insurance angle?
We need to do something to fix emergency room care in the US. I’m not sure what, but something. The current solution seems to be for special-purpose hospitals to open up without emergency rooms, and for “urgent care” clinics to open up for low-level emergencies for patients who either have insurance or can pay for their care. This basically works well for nobody.
September 27th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
If we were to compare “time to care” (measured from the time you check into the emergency room to the time you finally see a doctor) there would be substantial differences between black and white populations with the same illness, and the same insurance. It’s difficult to say why Vance specifically didn’t receive care in this case but on average I’m thinking that when a black person says they’re pain rates a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, that “10″ is weighted differently than the “10″ of a white person. The politics of care.
September 27th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
“HOW THE VICTIM RACE CHANGED HER CARE”There’s docomentation that a person race does affect health care,and class.Caregiver are making life and death situation daily,one would have to be naive to think it doesn’t.Sis Vance was aprehensive about going to emergency dress in night cloths,her aprehension was not created in a vaccumm.
October 1st, 2006 at 10:51 am
To fix the problem, you’ve got to have some notion of how it’s happening. If the problem is that the nurse or EMT treats a 10 from a black patient on the pain question like a 5 from a white patient, you can kind-of see how to address that. Similarly, if black patients rate the pain of a rupturing appendix as a 5 when white patients rate it as a 10. Or if blacks tend to not come to the hospital unless things are much more serious, or don’t summarize their symptoms to the nurse or EMT screening them in the right way to get put at the front of the line.
Without that information, how is anyone going to address the problem? Lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, bad press, congressional investigations, they can all make you decide you’d like to solve the problem, but they’re not going to tell you much about how to solve it.