APRIL 25, 2019

With a one out of five-star rating from Medicare.gov and “C” safety rating from Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Grade as well as one-half stars out of five-stars on Yelp, St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx doesn’t look good on paper. Then again, lots of urban hospitals don’t look good on paper when it comes to quality of care ratings and reviews. Especially when those ratings and reviews concern their emergency rooms. According to a 2015 report in the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health, an urban emergency room can easily see upwards of 300 patients per day pass through their doors. With those kinds of numbers, doctors and nurses are bound to make mistakes and some patients are likely to walk away dissatisfied with the treatment they received. However, there is a huge difference between minor and major mistakes and there is a huge difference between walking away dissatisfied and not being able to walk away because you are severely disabled or dead. 

The St. Barnabas Emergency Room falls into the latter category. 

On a cold blustery day back in December 2010, a then 39-year-old Bronx resident named Keimoneia Redish rushed to St. Barnabas because she had a bad cold. Suffering from severe asthma, Redish’s doctor had instructed her to get to a hospital as quickly as possible for ailments that non-asthma sufferers normally deem not serious. Ailments such as a cold. 

So Redish chose to go to St. Barnabas like she had eight times before when she had respiratory issues. Those previous eight times went well and she had been incubated without issue. But this time would be different.  

“I was under anesthesia and paralyzed so I really don’t remember much,” says Redish. “I just remember Clarence (her boyfriend) and I took a cab to St. Barnabas Hospital. I had a cold so I was always told by my doctor don't wait because it will only get worse. So we went to the hospital to get a treatment.”

 Once at St. Barnabas, Redish discovered that like the previous visits, she had a long wait ahead of her. She went to the store across the street and bought some chicken noodle soup to drink during her wait. 

When she was finally admitted, Redish was placed in the asthma section. 

“They sat me down in the asthma section and gave me several treatments,” says Redish. “I guess the treatments weren’t working so they placed me in a bed and gave me an IV.”

The IV was filled with steroids and that’s the last thing Redish remembers before everything went dark. 

“My family told me that doctors told them I was brain dead and they should think about donating my organs but my son and Clarence were not giving up,” says Redish. “My son Cain said he asked a doctor to do a cat scan again and the doctor told him no. To this day my family doesn’t know how I got carbon dioxide in my brain.” 

Redish credits her survival with her family’s unwillingness to give up on her. 

“The doctors told my family I had brain damage from a lack of oxygen,” says Redish. “My son felt something wasn't right. They told him I would die and he should sign something to donate my organs but he didn't. He was not giving up.” 

A month later Redish woke up in Daughters of Jacob Nursing Home in the Bronx. She couldn’t walk or talk. 

“I just remembered waking up, thinking it was the next day but it was one month later in the nursing home Daughters of Jacob,” says Redish. 

According to the Atlanta Black Star, Redish spent a total of 328 days at St. Barnabas and Daughters of Jacob before returning to her own Bronx home in October 2011. Today Redish lives in the same home with two of her sons and Clarence, her partner of 26 years and a former chef. She needs around the clock care. 

On April 12, 2019, Redish won a $110 million malpractice lawsuit against St. Barnabas Hospital and four doctors involved with her case. The lawsuit rested on the argument that rather than move her to a facility capable of dealing with her case, Dr. Darryl Adler, Dr. Richard Stumacher, Dr. Abdurham Ahmed and Dr. Ronald Ciubutaro continued to treat Redish at St. Barnabas eve n when it became apparent the hospital was unable to provide her with adequate care. According to the complaint, Redish was moved at one point to a back corner of St. Barnabas’s intensive care unit and was forgotten and not remembered until enough carbon dioxide had accumulated in her brain to cause crippling lifelong speech and motor impairment. 

The lack of vigilance and lack of care Redish experienced at St. Barnabas while extreme, is unfortunately not unique. Many other patients have experienced similar circumstances at St. Barnabas, the outcomes of their cases have – for whatever reason – just not been as horrific. 

68-year-old Kansas City native and current Boston resident Susan Holsapple counts her now four-year-old grandson lucky to be alive after a harrowing visit to the St. Barnabas emergency room in February 2016 when he was 18-months-old.

“We didn’t know it at the time, but he had a double ear infection, pneumonia, and a 105-degree fever,” says Holsapple. “The waiting room was so full of people – we were packed in like sardines. Have you ever seen Beetlejuice? It was like that. It was like waiting in a room full of zombies.”

Holsapple uses the term “zombies” to refer to the overabundance of drug addicts and homeless people who swarm into the St. Barnabas Emergency Room each day to spend as many hours as possible off the street. While it is good these people have a safe place to go, their triaging and their kicking out takes away attention from sick patients who desperately need immediate medical assistance from an already bare bones staff.

Holsapple and her grandson, whom Holsapple prefers not to name given his status as a minor, waited seven hours before they were finally checked in and waited another two hours before a preliminary diagnoses was given to them. 

“We waited seven hours in the waiting room and then another two hours once we were finally checked in,” says Holsapple. “Not once did we see a doctor. There was just this nurse going down each line of beds diagnosing everybody along. She would say to someone ‘Oh, you have gallbladder disease. You probably need to go have surgery.’ Or, ‘You need to go see your dentist.’ That was it. None of us ever saw a doctor.” 

Finally, a nurse spoke to Holsapple and her grandson for what Holsapple believes was all of 60 seconds. 

“She said, to me, ‘Now you know that fevers are your friends. You don’t want to fight a fever. The fever is there to fight for you,’” says Holsapple. “Then she told us we needed to leave.” 

With that, Holsapple and her grandson were forced out the door. The baby got sicker into the night and the following morning, Holsapple and her daughter thought the baby had stopped breathing. They rushed the baby to his pediatrician and discovered he had a fever of 105 degrees and was as Holsapple says, “a very sick little boy.” 

“His pediatrician was shocked St. Barnabas hadn’t treated him and immediately put the baby on a strong round of antibiotics.” 

34-year-old Jessica Rocchio had a similar experience with St. Barnabas staff and their nonchalant attitudes towards their patients when her 87-year-old father-in-law was taken to the hospital by ambulance after he fell at his nursing home. 

For eight hours, Rocchio was panic stricken because St. Barnabas insisted no patient with his name and birthdate was under their care. 

“I spoke with several dismissive staff – nurses I think – over the phone,” says Rocchio. “Finally I got a helpful person, after being on hold for about half an hour. She told me that they had never heard of my father-in-law.”

What ensued was an eight-hour panic for Rocchio as she tried to locate her father-in-law. She called multiple area hospitals wondering if maybe the nursing home had made a mistake in telling her that her father-in-law was taken to St. Barnabas to no avail. 

Rocchio was about to call 911 with a Silver Alert when she decided to call St. Barnabas one more time. “Some rude woman named Carol” in the St. Barnabas trauma area located her father in law under the name “Trauma Thomas.”  

Unbeknownst to Rocchio, the St. Barnabas Emergency Room code names trauma patients with the word “Trauma” followed by a random second name.  

“Their policy of creating ‘trauma names’ for patients seems counterintuitive,” says Rocchio. “My father-in-law came in there with a hospital ID already on his wrist, so they knew his name. They just code trauma patients as ‘Trauma Thomas’ for example, to push them to the head of the line for treatment - but this seems like a good way to end up in potter's field if you die under that name. Not to mention the impossibility of family locating their loved one. No one I spoke to volunteered that he might be under a trauma name, until the last staff member I spoke with.” 

Dr. Cullen Hagerty, Emergency Physician and Residency Director at the Health Partners and Regions Hospital System of Minnesota, has been asked as an independent part to review patient care practices at St. Barnabas multiple times.  

“Doctors mess up,” says Hagerty. “Everyone is human and they see a lot of people. But what is going on at St. Barnabas is more than just human error.” 

According to Hagerty, the problems start with St. Barnabas’s triage method which primarily consists of a wait your turn in the order you came in system no matter how severe your injury or ailment.  

“It shouldn’t matter if I go to the E.R. right now with hip pain and it’s pretty minor and I’ve been waiting for two hours but then someone shows up with chest pain and its serious and that person is rushed back,” says Hagerty. “But St. Barnabas consistently triages on a first come first serve basis.” 

When reached for comment, the St. Barnabas leadership team declined. 

According to Alan Sager, Director of the Health Reform Program at the Boston University School of Public Health, St. Barnabas has a history of providing patients with substandard and dangerous care ever since the 1980s when the hospital nearly went bankrupt from taking too many long-term patients without insurance.  

"Accidents of location and power determine how much money a hospital makes," says Sager. "Smaller and midsize hospitals – especially those located in low-income neighborhoods – are much more likely to close. St. Barnabas knows that and their operating practices are designed to make as much money as possible by pushing through as many patients as possible without regard to the standard of care their patients receive.”