Talk About Bad PR…
It looks pretty terrible for a hospital when someone dies slowly on the floor of their emergency room – while staff is standing around watching. Many were shocked and appalled when they tuned into Good Morning America and heard the story of Edith Rodriguez.
The woman was ignored by hospital staff even as she was bleeding internally and externally. This prompted a 911 call from her boyfriend who claimed that the staff was “just watching her.” In fact security cameras show a janitor cleaning the floor around where she lay.
Not surprisingly the public is in an outrage. We’re all thinking that she could have been our mom or sister. I have to wonder how the hospital staff will recover from this publicity, if they recover at all.
How should the hospital handle this crisis aside from replacing their emergency room staff?
Comments
It seems like this hospital has a lot more to worry about than a PR crisis at the moment. The natural reaction would just to throw up a wall and say "no comment", but the brave thing for this hospital to do would be to acknowledge the mistakes made, call for a thorough investigation and try to implement changes so this doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, the legal system (threats of lawsuits) and medical system (certain policies require processes such as this one), etc., may prevent them from handling it in this way.
The 'best' (in the long-term sense) thing in this case was that it did get major media attention. Sometimes major outrage is the only way to smash through the complex systems and circumstances that cause tragedies such as this.
Posted by: Keith Shaw | June 15, 2007 02:08 PM