From the Washington Post:
O n the night David Rosenbaum was attacked, taken by ambulance to Howard University Hospital and left on a stretcher in the hallway, the emergency room was “overwhelmed” and understaffed, the nurse in charge of the retired New York Times reporter dismissed him as “just an alcoholic” and the doctor who became alarmed at his condition had trouble getting anyone to help move the patient toward treatment, according to a firsthand account by a Howard physician.
When Ansri-Lawal noticed Rosenbaum in the hallway and asked a nurse why a man was lying there covered in his own vomit, the nurse replied that “she basically did not want to help me transfer the patient because she was busy doing other things,” said Ansri-Lawal, who has since left Howard to open an urgent care center in Fort Washington. “You know, they were short-staffed. She said she wasn’t able to transfer him right now, that he was just an alcoholic.”
“Stunned” to find Rosenbaum in the hall in his desperate condition, the physician asked to see his chart. But there was no chart. An hour after Rosenbaum had been brought in — by a D.C. ambulance crew that got lost on the way to help him, failed to properly diagnose his injuries and failed to take him to the closest ER, as the D.C. inspector general’s report found — no one had bothered to evaluate his condition, the deposition says. No one saw that he’d been bashed in the head with a pipe.
Once Ansri-Lawal saw the bump on Rosenbaum’s head, the Howard ER finally moved into action, clearing a passage for him to breathe and calling in the trauma team. It was too late. Rosenbaum died, his treatment became a scandal that led to changes at the top of the District’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department, his family sued the city and the hospital, and investigations and studies were launched.
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