Firings and Dismay After Woman's Death at Hospital

NEW YORK, July 2 -- It was a nightmare captured on surveillance video. A woman who had waited nearly 24 hours to be seen in a Brooklyn public hospital collapsed, fell face-down on the floor, convulsed and for nearly an hour -- while several hospital staff members looked at her and one staff member even prodded her with her foot -- received no aid. At some point during that time, she died.

The agency that runs the city's public hospitals responded by firing six staff members involved -- including a director of psychiatry and an on-duty physician -- and promising a list of improvements.

But the incident, which ended up on YouTube, has hit a raw nerve.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told reporters he had seen the video and was "disgusted."

"I can't explain what happened there," the mayor said earlier this week. "Does it say anything about our society? 'I hope not' is the basic answer."

After the incident received a wide public airing, the Health and Hospitals Corp., which administers the city's public hospitals, agreed to limit the number of patients in the emergency room to 25, and to check on them every 15 minutes, in order to settle a federal lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others. The suit, filed last year, describes the emergency room and inpatient unit at Kings County Hospital Center, where the incident occurred, as "a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger" and said patients are routinely neglected and drugged into submission.

"It is unconscionable that it took somebody keeling over and dying for the city to come to the table in a meaningful way," Donna Lieberman, executive director of the civil liberties union, said in a telephone interview. "This is evidence of a profound lack of respect for the humanity of people."

The woman, Esmin Elizabeth Green, 49, was taken to the hospital by emergency medical service workers on June 18. She was suffering from agitation and psychosis and was admitted involuntarily, according to the Health and Hospitals Corp.

She waited almost 24 hours in the G Building, the psychiatric emergency room, because of a shortage of beds, according to the hospital corporation.

City lawyers gave video from surveillance cameras to the civil liberties union as part of an evidence exchange for the court case.

The video, recorded in the early morning of June 19, shows Green, wearing a pale-blue hospital gown, fall off a chair onto the floor. About half an hour later, the video shows a security guard walk in, look at her, face-down and unmoving, and walk away.

Elsewhere in the video, a security guard rolls his chair into the room and out again, and another prods the woman with her foot.

About an hour after Green collapsed, hospital staff members rushed in with a gurney to help her, but she was already dead, according to the civil liberties union.

Afterward, the hospital's records contrasted with the account captured on video. Green's patient record says she got up to use the bathroom at 6 a.m. -- nearly half an hour after she collapsed -- and that she "was sitting quietly in the waiting area" at 6:20 a.m. -- when the video shows her lying on the floor.