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They didn't turn him out on the street: they sent him to the emergency room and he died en-route. Urgent care clinics are not hospitals, they don't even like wr
by ng12 7y ago
They didn't turn him out on the street: they sent him to the emergency room and he died en-route. Urgent care clinics are not hospitals, they don't even like writing prescriptions for anything other than antibiotics. At best they could have called him an ambulance.
- CodeWriter23 7y agoThe kid would likely have died waiting for an ambulance in Los Angeles. Especially up in the Antelope Valley. If he had transportation, expeditiously sending him on his way was the right call.
- fiftyfifty 7y agoThis. People need to understand that these clinics are not equipped to deal with this stuff, they do not have ventilators and equipment like that. They are not hospitals, some are no bigger than a dentist office. Some clinics like this may only have one doctor on staff with just Nurses and PAs seeing patients. If this kid was in that bad of shape they probably couldn't have helped him at this facility.
- salawat 7y agoDoesn't matter. If they made the professional judgement call he needed more than they could offer, someone should have been calling 911 in order to get a meat wagon on the way. If he was bad enough gone to have to head to an ER, th he Urgent Care should have at a minimum hit him with prednisone and a nebulizer treatment to get his airways open. Most also have Epi-Pens on site if they were really worried about his chances of making it to the hospital alive. You don't get to cherry-pick patients because it's inconvenient. Shit happens, and you're the Doc/NP. Get out the prescription pad, write a scrip or call in to the nearest pharmacy to expedite, and have office staff or whoever drove him in pick it up. Welcome to professional culpability. Now if what they said was, we won't see you because you can't pay; go to the ER, some naming and shaming is in order.
- ng12 7y agoIf someone's at risk of dying on the way to the hospital making a CVS run is not the right call.
- salawat 7y agoMore meant as a mitigation to "The ambulance will be here in 15 minutes. Go next door, get this, and bring it back so I can keep him alive until then." You are by no means helpless as a medical practitioner with modern pharmaceuticals minutes away most anywhere. Not "Stop at CVS on your way there." Once a medical practitioner sees you are in need of more intensive care the onus is on them to ensure they do what they can to get you there alive. I'm fairly secure in my assertion of these courses of action. Even bounced it off an RN to make sure; so I'm not just pulling it out of my ass here.
- bjourne 7y agoBut when they did, they must have realized he was in a life-threatening situation. Covid-19 doesn't make you go from a minor cough to death in a few hours.
- ng12 7y agoThat's why they wouldn't have been able to do anything for him. They don't have the means to intubate him. They only handle minor physical injuries, x-rays, vaccines, and things treatable by routine prescriptions.
- bjourne 7y agoBut they could have done something for him! They could have called an ambulance for him to ensure that he was rushed into a proper healthcare facility! That they didn't and just turned him away because he lacked proper insurance is sick and insane. That's would have happened in any country with universal healthcare. If I go to a local healthcare facility and they think I'm having symptoms of a heart attack they just don't shrug their shoulders. They would call an ambulance and get me to a real hospital asap. Look at the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkhnAF7E5xw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkhnAF7E5xw All they did was refer him to another hospital. Sickening.
- bjourne 7y agoThey referred him to another hospital. That's what I would call "turn him out on the street". Likely, the boy had no idea how bad his condition was. Had he been examined by the physicians it would have been found out and he would have been rushed to a real hospital.