Man dies after 10 calls to 911

There are some cases that we read about where you shake your head and wonder "What were they thinking?" You get a gut feeling that something was done wrong; an injustice that should have been addressed.

This is one of those cases.

In today's Newsday, writer Dan Neffin reported that a man having severe abdominal pain called 911 for emergency  assistance. The man's girlfriend, Sharon Edge called 911 and was repeatedly told "help is on the way." Help never came. The boyfriend, Curtis Mitchell, died in his home without anyone ever coming to take him to a hospital.

 Of course this story would not be complete without explaining that on February 6, 2010, the day he suffered severe pain and needed to go to a hospital, heavy snow was falling which brought Pittsburgh to a standstill.  In addition, because of the snowstorm he had no electricity and was waiting for an Ambulance while huddled under a blanket.

Recently in New York we had a case involving a gentleman who passed out in a store and there were two emergency medical service workers at the store who apparently refused to render assistance to him. Their excuse was that they were telephone operators and had not rendered medical assistance in more than 15 years despite the fact that they were wearing their emergency medical services uniforms while on a lunch break.

If this had happened in New York, would there be liability against the city and emergency medical services?

To answer that question you need to look at the relationship between the person calling and the relationship of person giving information. The person calling is requesting an ambulance for an emergency medical condition. The telephone operator who answered the call, according to news reports, promised that help was on the way. The operator then contacted ambulance personnel and there were at least a dozen calls between 911 and paramedics. One could argue that there was an obligation together with reassurances to the victim that help was on the way and that assistance would be there shortly.

Interestingly, Pittsburgh public safety director Michael Huss said that the victim might have survived if he had been carried out to an ambulance.

Anytime you have a failure by a municipal agency to timely act, the question always is whether that delay in getting to the patient would have made a difference. If the answer is yes, then you have a strong argument that they had an obligation to attend to this man, and that their failure to timely get him to a hospital caused and contributed to his untimely death.

Just unbelievable.