When a psychiatric patient shows up at the emergency room at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, the staff quickly removes anything dangerous before placing them in a treatment room.
Patient Safety and Ethics
Flossie Horace said she would have been too nervous to care for her grandson without the seemingly simple-looking equipment that allowed her grandson’s nursery to become a sophisticated communication center linked with doctors at the University of Virginia.
Patrick Russell was one of almost 500 people to die in Southern California jails in the past decade. A grand jury report found almost half of the deaths in Orange County jails from 2014 to 2017 may have been preventable.
Last year, the University of Virginia marked its 1,000th telestroke consultation in its first three years. Thirty-five to 40 patients a month in rural hospitals benefit from specialty care that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Parents who have had their children removed, employees who are treated unfairly or relatives who have been unable to gain custody of their family members are left behind in a system with no oversight.
This story was produced as a project for the 2018 Data Fellowship.
Even Ballad Health’s most ardent supporters are frustrated with the health care system’s seeming failure to respond to concerns about patient care.
The department has taken a number of steps since it was sued in 2016 by the Prison Law Office, which alleged that San Bernardino County jails were violating the constitutional rights of its almost 6,000 inmates.
When an expert on correctional health care toured Riverside County’s jails in 2015, he found a shocking situation: For the past two years, one lone physician had been on staff to serve a system that booked almost 60,000 inmates a year.
Critics of Orange County’s jails fear that not enough action is being taken to improve health care in the wake of a series of recent watchdog reports that raised serious concerns about inmates’ well-being.