Nurse was dying outside her hospital. Was it right to take her to another ER?
Woman had been stabbed in parking lot
CORAL SPRINGS — As Merin Joy lay dying in a Coral Springs hospital parking lot, a 911 caller was frantic that help needed to come immediately.
Police say Joy’s husband had just stabbed her 17 times and run over her with a car. The dispatcher questioned what was going on, given that Joy was just footsteps from instant aid.
“You are in front of a hospital, can you go inside and tell a nurse?” the dispatcher asked. “Can someone go into the hospital and tell a nurse? You are in front of a hospital.”
That’s a question her family now has, too. Could paramedics have saved Joy’s life if they had kept her at Broward Health Coral Springs instead of taking her to another hospital?
“We definitely have questions: Why didn’t they even attempt to take her into the emergency room and do [something]?” said Joy’s cousin, Joby Uralil. “The natural thing is to take them to the nearest hospital.”
But the Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department said it made no mistake when first responders rushed the young nurse to a hospital in Deerfield Beach, which took 16 minutes to make the 9-mile trip.
“It is hard for a non-medical professional to wrap their heads around bypassing a hospital to get to another one, even though it is farther away,” said Deputy Chief Michael Moser.
“But some hospitals specialize in certain types of care and can offer a higher level of treatment to a patient, even if it takes a few minutes longer to get there,” Moser said. “We call this transporting to the closest appropriate facility.”
The extent of Joy’s injuries meant she would be sent to the trauma hospital in Deerfield Beach — at least according to the criteria that takes into account the extent of injuries and gives guidance to first responders.
Paramedics at times may deviate from the plan and make “paramedic judgment,” he said. “It’s just a hunch they have sometimes.”
The attack happened about 7:30 a.m. after Joy had left her overnight shift from the hospital. Police said witnesses and surveillance video show her husband, Philip Mathew, attacking her. He has been charged with her murder and is in Broward jail with no bond.
The 911 calls came at 7:38 a.m., according to police records. Moser said paramedics were at Joy’s side at 7:44 a.m. and began driving at 7:50 a.m., arriving in Deerfield Beach at 8:06 a.m.
She died at 8:51 a.m., more than an hour after the attack. Still, Moser said “it was still the best option,” he said.
Similar choices are made when it’s a child who has experienced trauma: Paramedics need to drive past hospitals to get to Fort Lauderdale. Or in another instance,
“certain hospitals handle strokes,” Moser said. “It’s better to drive by a hospital to one that specializes in strokes to increase your chance of survival.”
Moser said this isn’t the first time a patient has been rerouted.
“This happens more often than you think. Someone will pull up in a car and pull out their buddy that just got shot” and 911 is called and that person is taken to North Broward Medical Center in Deerfield Beach instead.
Not going to the right place is “like taking your 5-year-old to an adult dentist or a geriatric doctor.”
But in another high-profile case, rerouting from protocol had paid off.
When a gunman’s bullets riddled Parkland’s high school in 2018, Lt. Laz Ojeda of the Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department had been told that his patient, Maddy Wilford, needed to go to the children’s hospital in Fort Lauderdale, about 30 miles away.
Ojeda made the decision to take her to a hospital just 10 miles from the high school, worried the girl would die before they got to Fort Lauderdale.
Asked whether Ojeda’s call to take her to Broward Health North in Deerfield Beach instead of the more distant hospital saved Wilford’s life, Dr. Igor Nichiporenko, medical director of trauma services at the hospital, said “yes, of course” at a news conference.
Moser said although paramedics followed the rules by the book, “it’s a hard pill to swallow when someone’s in the parking lot of the hospital and didn’t go into the hospital,” he said.