An official Los Angeles County assessment has acknowledged for the first time that a woman who died shortly after writhing in pain for nearly an hour on the waiting room floor of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Medical Center could have been saved if she had been properly treated.
Edith Rodriguez was captured on security videotape as a janitor mopped around her and a triage nurse dismissed her complaints in the early morning of May 9, 2007. Her death helped to precipitate the closure of the hospital's emergency room and inpatient care after federal regulators determined that staffers had failed to deliver a minimum standard of care.
The 43-year-old woman's boyfriend, who had accompanied her to the emergency room and called 911 from a nearby pay phone after no one would help, recently was offered a $250,000 settlement by county supervisors. A separate lawsuit against the county filed by her adult children could potentially prove far more costly and is considered more likely to go to trial.
The indifference shown to Rodriguez's suffering made national news and outraged county supervisors and national health authorities as well as area residents. A federal report issued last year concluded that six staff members, including a nurse and two nursing assistants, saw or walked past Rodriguez but did nothing.
She died from a perforated bowel shortly after she was arrested on an outstanding warrant instead of being treated.
The potential county payouts in the Rodriguez case would mark the latest in a long history of settlements and judgments against the now-shuttered hospital for poor patient care.
A 2004 Times series on failures at the facility found the county had paid $20.1 million in malpractice cases during fiscal years 1999 to 2003, more than at any of the state's other public hospitals or the University of California medical centers, once adjusted for the number of patients.
The internal county assessment that Rodriguez could have been successfully treated was inadvertently made public, at least briefly, when lawyers working for the county mistakenly included it in a recent court filing. The attorneys quickly moved to seal the filing when they realized the error.
"Our in-house reviewed [sic] felt she could have been saved, at least in the early part of her detention," according to the report prepared by Sedgwick Caronia, an outside firm hired to evaluate the county risk.
