CRITICAL CONDITION
Montefiore nurses: Patients suffer in dangerous and crowded emergency room
Sickly patients packed into rooms like sardines. Psych patients attacking harried hospital staffers. Nurses forced to treat up to 12 critically ill children at the same time.
The Montefiore Medical Center emergency units are often dangerously overcrowded and unruly — imperiling the lives of the ailing Bronx residents who flock there, nurses told the Daily News.
“It looks like a refugee camp in a war zone,” said nurse Benny Matthew, 41, who works at the main Moses Campus’ ER in the Norwood section of the Bronx. “I’m from India. Even if I go to an emergency room in my country, I don’t see things like this.”
City councilman Ritchie Torres, alarmed by the harrowing accounts from hospital staffers, sent a letter to the Department of Investigation on Friday calling for an immediate probe.
“Relegating recipients of Medicaid to cramped and crowded hallways — teeming with sick patients, many of them with infections — creates an environment conducive to more illness, not less,” wrote Torres (DBronx).
In an interview with The News, Torres said he was exasperated by the lack of urgency from Montefiore execs.
“There seems to be a profound disconnect between the immaculate image Montefiore projects out to the public and the nightmarish reality of its own emergency room,” Torres said.
A Montefiore spokeswoman released a lengthy statement touting its Top 10 ranking on an Indeed.com list of best hospital workplaces — and described its nurses as the “heart and soul of our approach to care.”
“We cannot speak to where these staffing numbers come from but they do not match ours,” added spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaledin. “We continuously monitor our staffing levels to provide the best, safest care for our patients.”
Nurses say the troubles at Montefiore have been brewing for years — and government data appears to back up their accounts.
The average time emergency room patients wait before being seen by a health care worker is 64 minutes, according to federal statistics. That’s more than double the national average of 26 minutes and significantly higher than the state average of 39 minutes.
Frustrated hospital staffers insist they’ve been complaining to higher-ups about the conditions, but the pleas for help have fallen on deaf ears.
“It’s heartbreaking to try to deliver the care that you want to give and you can’t do it because you don’t have the resources,” said Xenia Greene, a pediatric ICU nurse at Montefiore’s main site in Norwood.
Greene said the pediatric emergency room is often so overcrowded she’s forced to take care of up to a dozen children at once. At most hospitals, she said, the ratio is one pediatric ICU nurse to three patients.
“It’s physically impossible to provide the empathetic, compassionate loving care when you’re dealing with that kind of ratio,” Greene said.
“I can go without eating for 12 hours. I can go without a break. But I can’t make another nurse appear on my own.”
To be sure, big hospitals in low-income areas are often pressed to deal with deluges of uninsured patients who flood emergency rooms seeking basic care.
But the chaos at Montefiore extends beyond the emergency units, according to Ana Reyes, a nurse who works on a medical-surgical floor at Montefiore’s Jack D. Weiler Hospital in Morris Park.
Reyes said it’s not uncom-
mon for patients in need of surgery to end up in her unit only to find out there are no available rooms.
Nurses have no choice but to leave them in the hallways surrounded by screens.
“They’re constantly under fluorescent lights and there’s constant movement,” said Reyes, 44. “We’re moving screens and passing stretchers right by them all night long.”
Keeping patients in the hallways also creates other problems.
People with the flu are placed in isolation but they have to use the hallways to get there.
All it takes is one poorlytimed cough for those germs to infect a patient stuck in the hallway.
“They didn’t have it before, but now they do,” said Reyes, who wondered why the hospital doesn’t open up beds at its Westchester Square campus.
Matthew said he has become accustomed to walking into the emergency room and seeing up to 180 patients crammed into a space designed for a maximum of 70.
Spaced no more than an inch apart, the patients have no privacy when answering sensitive questions. The unit, in which patients often sit for hours waiting to be admitted, is also a breeding ground for infections, Matthew said.
“I’ve seen it a lot of times with older people,” Matthew said. “They sit in the bed for long hours. They go home. And then they come back really sick.”
Matthew has no shortage of personal horror stories.
He once had to rush a woman experiencing kidney failure to the dialysis room. It was only 50 feet away from her spot in the ER, but Matthew said the journey took 45 minutes.
Every few steps, he had to move another patient’s stretcher out of the way.
“She survived, thank God,” Matthew said. “There are a lot of near misses like this.”
Matthew had his own near-miss roughly eight months ago.
It happened in a section of the emergency room where overflow psychiatric patients are squeezed into a space beside non-mentally ill people who require critical care.
Nurses say the arrangement is a recipe for disaster, with jittery psych patients forced to sit within inches from people receiving CPR or blood transfusions or some other traumatic form of treatment.
One day, Matthew was helping to hook up a mentally ill man to a cardiac monitor when the patient suddenly lashed out. “He put me in a chokehold and started hitting me in my face, head and all over my body,” Matthew recalled. “I couldn’t run because there was no place to move.”
The veteran nurse wasn’t seriously hurt. He didn’t even harbor any ill will toward the man.
In fact, Matthew felt bad for the psych patient and the others like him who are sometimes forced to languish in a packed room with loud devices for days at a time.
“They don’t get a shower. They don’t get proper counseling,” Matthew said. “It’s actually inhuman.”