She was an er patient at st Joseph’s . she keep getting lost & ended up in er rooms. she had kidney failure and clear signs of dementia. Hospital called us told us they are treating her for uti and dehydration & releasing her. I asked they keep her for the night till we can get there and if they can exam her for dementia. They said no she came in for symptoms she was treated for they had to release her. So they did to an emergency cold shelter in a taxi alone. They didn’t call shelter to confirm if it was open. & it was closed down day before. Taxi that hospital paid for left her on the street. We lost her for 2 weeks. She was found agin in a hospital and we finally got her care. But I want to make sure no one else’s mom goes through this. St Joseph’s hospital in orange never took responsibility for there mistake. What can I do?
Seek out attorneys for consultation to see if there are grounds for a lawsuit.
Contact local news organizations to see if they will cover the story.
Contact APS and tell them what is going on with MIL. You and She need a state social worker to help get her the proper care.
None of these 'pay back' options will "make sure no one else’s mom goes through this".
If M 'kept getting lost', things could have gone wrong in many other ways as well. Working out better care, perhaps with help from APS, is the most constructive option.
If your mother has dementia and wanders around out-of-it, why didn't the 'we' you mention here take some action before she got dropped off at a closed down homeless shelter?
Please, you're looking for a payday and are trying to put a positive spin on it so 'no one else's mom goes through this'. No one believes this.
Even if there was money to be had from a hospital lawsuit, it would not be going to you. Your mother is the harmed party here. Financial compensation would be on behalf of your mother and it would be spent on her facility care bill. Medicaid isn't going to pay for your mother to be in a memory care or nursing home and let you spend a cash settlement. It doesn't work like that.
Your mother likely doesn't have a case anyway if the hospital followed their protocol for your mother's treatment and discharge. Hospital protocols and policies are reviewed by lawyers before they become protocols and policies. Hospitals have their own lawyers who make sure the legality is air-tight to prevent lawsuits forming. They're not legally wrong. They are morally wrong. So are you though.
If you think I sound harsh and judgmental, wait until one of the hospital's lawyers questions you.
Forget about trying to get a payday from the hospital because that's not going to happen. Be grateful that your mother was not harmed and is now getting the care she needs. You should keep closer contact with her and advocate on her behalf if she has dementia because she can't advocate for herself.
This is nothing to address via an attorney. As there was no permanent injury and a hospital often will not do neurological exams routinely when there is a UTI, but will rather treat the UTI, and discharge. There is little else you can do. But what you have here is a failure to check that the shelter was open. And an unsafe discharge.
As an indigent person living without housing your mother is at great risk now with known dementia. She should now have guardianship of the state, assessment and placement or this is only the very beginning. Next time could result in her death. I am so very sorry but I am wondering if you have called APS to try to get her assessment and placement?
This is not the fault of the hospital and is certainly not going to result in a payday for anyone, sorry.
It doesn’t answer your question . But I’m curious if you were having trouble getting this situation addressed even prior . I’m wondering how difficult it is to get APS or social services to address a homeless person with possible dementia .
How did she get to the hospital ?
Also ER will not test for dementia .
It's very hard to get APS or social services to address a homeless person with dementia.
This is why there are tent cities set up in parks and on sidewalks across the country.
Most of those homeless people are mentally ill, have dementia, or they're addicts. Many addicts become that way because they have mental illness that goes without professional treatment and they self-medicate.
APS for the most part is a wild card. You never know what you're going to get from those people. I have seen them take zero action on cases that were serious. I called for an elderly care client that I worked for years ago. He lived alone and was completely out-of-it with dementia. He had been robbed several times. The home of a demented senior who lives alone and keeps lots of cash around is going to be Ali Baba's treasure cave for any number of degenerate low-lifes. Open sesame. He kept a number of guns in house but was too out-of it- with dementia to safely use one if he had to. There were holes in the walls of his house. APS never even saw him. A social worker did a 'phone assessment' with him instead and determined that he was competent to remain at home. His sister finally got involved and went to the police. The police were the only ones that helped.
It's a real grab-bag with APS sometimes. You can get lazy, useless, paycheck-collecting humps that only rise up off their fat a$$es because the police put pressure on them to.
Then you get the ones who are so over-zealous that they're like the Gustapo of social services and will get a person put into residential care because there's a dirty dish in their sink or a load of laundry in the washer. Grandma doesn't get ice cream and donuts for supper every night so she's being "deprived" and "starved". They get her removed from her family's house and put away. I have seen this happen many times.
In my opinion, if an elder with dementia or a mentally ill person is living alone, the best bet is to deal with the police department and ask them to do wellness checks on them before getting APS involved. If there's police involvement APS does their job properly. Otherwise you're taking a chance.
Since the OPs MIL doesn't have a medical diagnosis of cognitive impairment and didn't have a medical representative, PoA or legal guardian who (while she was in the ER) could tell the admins that she was an unsafe discharge, the hospital discharged her (assuming she wanted to go) and made sure to get her out.
The OPs story about her MIL is so very dismaying but I don't know what other solution there would have been, given the checks and balances of people's ability to make decisions for themselves unless proven to otherwise be unable. There has to be proof of incapacity. Legal and medical proof.
If the MIL gets herself to the ER, and doesn't call any other relative or person to be there to help them, this is not the hospital's problem. They can only go by what the patient tells them, and they have no way to know if the info is accurate.
Did the hospital send the MIL to a shelter because she is actually homeless? Or because she was confused and couldn't remember her address? The discharge person definitely should have called the shelter first to make sure they could take her.
Chrisann, you ask the question, "What can I do?"
What is it that you'd like to see happen from the hospital's end? What does "take responsibility" look like to you?
You can go on to Nextdoor.com (if you are an orange resident) and tell that community what happened like you did here. Also FaceBook and any other social media. Thank you for posting about this terrible experience. It will help others.