February 3rd, 2010

Reports the Philadelphia Inquirer:

A senior executive from Aria Health, owner of the Northeast Philadelphia hospital where Joaquin Rivera died in November as he waited for emergency treatment, said yesterday that staff did not follow company policy requiring periodic checks on patients in the waiting room.

Chief operating officer Linde Finsrud Wilson, testifying at a City Council hearing on Rivera’s death, said the hospital had since trained staff to keep better tabs on waiting patients. She said it also had added a second full-time security guard in the 25-seat waiting room, where Rivera’s watch was stolen after he died.

The three-hour hearing in Council chambers was the first public forum devoted to the events of Nov. 28, when Rivera, 63, walked into the waiting room at Aria’s Frankford campus, formerly called Frankford Hospital. It included testimony from an attorney for the family and a senior official from the state Department of Health, who elaborated on state findings – announced last month – that Aria had failed to deliver adequate care.

“There were policies and procedures that, if they had been followed, might’ve given us a different outcome,” said Stacy Mitchell, the department’s deputy secretary for quality assurance.

Wilson, the Aria executive, said an examination of a security video showed Rivera died 11 minutes after he arrived at 10:45 p.m., complaining of pain in his left side.

Read the rest of this article at the Inquirer, and read even more at the Philadelphia Daily News.