SICK! ... AND TIRED OF WAITING 6 HOURS TO SEE DOC AT B’KLYN HOSP
Patients endure long waits for help at Kings County Hospital, the worst in the city
When her diabetic mom’s blood sugar suddennly soared, Jacqueline Logan rushed the ailing woman to Kings County Hospital.
Five hours later, the two were still waiting for a doctor.
“I thought she’d be seen by now,” said Logan while sitting in the emergency room last Wednesday. “It’s the first time I’ve come here. I don’t think I’m ever coming back.”
Patients need patience at the Brooklyn hospital where time sometimes seems to stand still. People with nonlife-threatening ailments typically waited almost 90 minpublic utes to see a doctor at Kings County.
The lengthy delay is the longest wait of any of the city’s 11 hospitals operated by the cash-strapped NYC Health + Hospitals Corp.
Kings County, the borough’s main level-1 trauma center, serves some of Brooklyn’s poorest residents. Many lack insurance and rely on Medicare or Medicaid.
“It’s so evident that the city has to invest in more doctors and nurses at these overburdened hospitals,” said City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, chair of the Committee on Hospitals.
In some Kings County cases, the patient’s wait can stretch to five or six hours. “It don’t make no sense,” said Logan.
Fuming in the seat beside Logan sat Milayo Negesti, 42, who arrived suffering with pain from a lump in her breast. Her wait was already at four hours.
“The pain is radiating down my arm,” she said. “I’ve never had to wait here this long. It’s absurd.”
Yet according to city records, the emergency room numbers actually improved at Kings County Hospital between 2013 and 2017.
The average wait time there dropped from 1 hour and 54 minutes in 2013 to 1 hour and 26 minutes last year, according
to data obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request.
“Before it used to be worse,” agreed patient Paul Tirone, 58, who waited for two hours with his wife for her foot ailment.
The trend reversed in the early part of 2018, with the wait times again going up.
Patients were left to stew in the waiting room for an average of an hour and 43 minutes in January, February and March this year, department statistics reveal.
Medical personnel at the hospital are often overwhelmed by trauma cases or other serious medical emergencies — delaying the lesspressing cases, according to staffers at the facility.
The hospital actually became so busy that it was forced to go on diversion and direct EMS to temporarily send pathird tients to other hospitals 28 times in 2017.
That’s actually down from the 50 such times in 2016.
The diversion call is typically tied to a mass casualty event like a bus accident or a high volume of patients with an infectious disease during peak flu season.
The top patient diagnosis was “chest pain” with 3,459 visits in 2017 and 2018 so far. The second most popular ailment was “lower back pain” with 3,338 visits, and “acute respiratory infection” was with 3,263 visits.
The hospital’s history of extensive wait times in nothing new. In 2008, a 49-year-old woman died on the floor of the psychiatric emergency room after waiting more than 24 hours for help.
Hospital officials then reorganized parts of the emergency department to speed up patient flow. Now, city officials plan to begin construction on an Express Care clinic in 2019.
That clinic is designed to provide “faster access to medical care for patients who face non-life-threatening conditions.”
NYC Health + Hospitals has plans for similar state-of-theart clinics at Elmhurst Hospi- tal in Queens and at Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx.
The idea is to bring the clinics to each of the agency’s 11 hospitals.
The three new clinics will encompass more than 100,000 square in total and cost an estimated $82 million to construct. They are all slated to open by 2021.
Health + Hospitals officials say the facilities are a central part of a broader move laid out in September “to transform the health system’s vast ambulatory care operation, improve access to in-demand primary and specialty care, and reverse the recent trend of declining outpatient visits.”
Triage nurses at the ERs will be able to transfer patients with less serious issues to the clinics. That is expected to vastly reduce wait times for others in the ER.
If necessary, patients at the express clinics will be connected with primary care physicians.
The clinics are also expected to “increase revenue with new billing and coding practices,” according to Health + Hospitals. Insurance companies and the federal government over the past few years have increased payments for medical services provided at urgent care and express clinics. That’s been done to encourage people to stay away from costly ER visits.