Missing patient found dead in hospital stairwell two weeks later

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 by: PF Louis
Tags: hospital care, dead patient, medical negligence

(NaturalNews) By now, the news of that woman found dead in a San Francisco hospital stairwell after being missing for two weeks has had its day and maybe even worn out its news "legs." But the questions raised have legs of their own.

The questions concerning how it happened open a can of worms regarding hospital care issues that may make you think twice before checking into any hospital.

The San Francisco General Hospital incident

Just in case you missed it, here's a summary of that incident. 57-year-old Lynn Spalding, an English woman living in San Francisco, checked into the San Francisco General Hospital late September with what was reported as an infection.

Amazingly, none of the press items online describe the infection, not even if it was external or internal, disease or injury infection. Just that she was being treated for an infection.

Friends who had visited her in the hospital two days prior to her disappearance said she was thin, frail, confused and disoriented, possibly from medications.

Although her room was reportedly checked every 15 minutes, she disappeared with her purse but left her cell phone behind. There's no statement of when a search was initiated, but friends and neighbors had begun posting missing person signs in the neighborhood.

Two weeks later, a dead body was found in a rarely used stairwell by someone doing a quarterly check of the fire exit door at the bottom of that stairwell. [1]

Though not immediately confirmed, there was enough information to deduce it was Lynn. An interesting side note is that the fire escape door that opened to the hospital grounds is locked from the outside.

Is that so people can come in when there's a fire? Most fires escape doors can be opened from within and set off alarms when opened.

This apparent lapse of attention and care in a modern medical institution complex is not an isolated case.

Many cases of adverse events go unreported in hospitals

In the USA, adverse event reporting is voluntary. It's not required. So any sense of guilt can be covered by not reporting. Even if a medical professional cares, the paperwork may be too distracting from hectic hospital activities.

This is the way it is with vaccinations, chemotherapy, whatever. If someone dies or gets ill from an allopathic intervention, the disease or some sort of complication is often cited as the cause, not the treatment itself.

One report claims there are just under 100,000 hospital adverse events from preventable errors in America annually. That's with the current "voluntary" adverse event reporting system. So there are probably many more that aren't reported at all. [2]

Those statistics are the outcome of a voluntary reporting system reported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Patient Safety Indicators. A new system, the Global Trigger Tool shows an even worse record.

Global Trigger has determined that up to 90% of adverse events are unreported, and "generally, overall adverse events occur in one out of three hospital admissions." (Emphasis added) [3]

Let's face it, when you're in a hospital, you're at the mercy of a system that is at least the third highest cause of death in America, behind heart disease and cancer. [4]

And the first and second causes of death are often exacerbated by the third, our forced allopathic health care system.

Include inferior-quality hospital food and being awakened often to check if your liver is managing to hold up with all those toxins forced on you. A lack of good sleep and unhealthy, dead food are not conducive to full recovery, especially when you get those outrageous medical bills.

Sources for this article include:

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com

[2] http://www.motherjones.com

[3] http://content.healthaffairs.org

[4] http://www.naturalnews.com