The patient in Room 373 refuses to leave.
Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare earlier this month sued the patient, saying she has refused to depart her hospital room since being discharged last October. The hospital also has asked a state judge in Tallahassee for an injunction ordering the patient to vacate the hospital room and authorizing the county sheriff’s office to assist if necessary.
The hospital said that resources have been diverted from helping other patients because of her occupation of the room.
Since the hospital can’t share information on a legal matter, the commenters on the article are fascinating. People’s baseline guesses from limited information are all over the map. What is the woman in their imagination like? Why is she doing this? What does this woman they’re imagining deserve?
The comments from people who work in healthcare (and therefore have more information to work off of) are more interesting in a useful way, of course.
That part says plenty to me. They haven’t actually established that she has anywhere to go. One thing I don’t miss about Taxi and Rideshare driving: transporting people directly from ERs to homeless shelters. I’ve had hospitals try to get me to pickup people wearing nothing but hospital gowns, no possessions, rolled out in a wheel-chair the hospital was keeping and requiring someone to physically load them into the vehicle.
Saving the sly retrieval of the hospital’s bedpan for last was a nice touch on their part - no healthcare “professional” should be so smooth at all this, and comfortable with it, as these people are.
Mind you, in my state, any form of physical contact between hired driver and passenger is illegal outside of dedicated medical transportation services - I COULD NOT LEGALLY help them leave the vehicle. I thank God I drove Taxi for the year before Uber and Lyft came to my town so that I had the time to learn this stuff, and I was stupid-sad the day it became clear that Ride-share was going to be no better about it than the Taxi service.
Actually, greedy-ass Uber and Lyft are worse for doing fuck-all to be sure that I drivers know the laws on it in advance. I am amazed I’ve never hear of them and the health-insurance companies being sued into oblivion over the lack of due-diligence alone. I used to literally dream of being put on the stand to testify against them -not nightmares, dreams.
Shudder to think of the situations I and these patients could have been stuck in if I didn’t call-ahead to the destinations to make sure there was someone there to help un-load, nevermind the times I either refused the ride on patient-safety grounds or drove them to another ER by (obviously valid)request. A few times I was able to convince a nicer shelter to take certain individuals in, but mostly I just felt powerless along with these victims.