Social media fury follows video of dazed woman put out in cold by Baltimore hospital
‘Y’all just going to leave this lady out here with no clothes on?’
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox, Theresa Vargas and Justin Wm. Moyer.
Four black-clad hospital security guards walked past Imamu Baraka on a Baltimore sidewalk. One was pushing an empty wheelchair. The security guards had just left a dazed woman at a bus stop near the University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus. The temperatures were in the mid-30s that Tuesday night, and she was wearing a thin hospital gown and socks.
“So wait, y’all just going to leave this lady out here with no clothes on?” Baraka said to the security guards. He was using his cell phone to film them.
The woman left outside could barely walk and seemed unable to speak.
It was the latest incident of “patient dumping,” which has sparked outrage around the country — and one that, according to an expert, probably violated a 1986 federal law that mandates hospitals release those in their care into a safe environment.
“This kind of behavior is, I think, both illegal and I’m sure immoral,” said Arthur L. Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine. “You don’t just throw someone out into the street who is impaired and may have injuries. You try to get them to the best place possible, and that’s not the bench in front of the hospital.”
The phenomenon was pervasive two decades ago, when the law was largely unenforced, Caplan said, but it remains a problem from California to Virginia. Just last month in California, a 78-year-old man, disoriented and suffering from arthritis, was discharged from a Sacramento hospital and sent in a taxi to a homeless shelter that had no room for him, the Sacramento Bee reported.
“That is not okay,” Baraka, a licensed counselor, shouted at the security guards.
“Due to the circumstances of what it was,” one of them said.
“Then you all need to call the police,” Baraka replied.
At the doorway, Baraka asked for a supervisor, demanding to know why hospital staffers were leaving her outside.
“She was . . . medically discharged,” one of the guards said, before the camera captured them walking into the hospital, their backs turned.
What Baraka filmed next — the woman, staggering and screaming into a night so cold that the sidewalk remained speckled with salt and bits of unmelted snow — has been viewed more than 1.4 million times on Facebook, triggering a cascade of online fury and an apology from the hospital.
At a news conference Thursday afternoon, the hospital’s chief pledged to investigate what he described as “a failure of basic compassion and empathy.”
“We firmly believe what occurred Tuesday night does not reflect who we are,” said Mohan Suntha, the hospital’s president and chief executive. “We are trying to understand the points of failure that led to what we witnessed on that video.”
Suntha would not provide details on the personnel involved, saying the review of the woman’s experience from arrival to discharge had just begun. Nor would he speak to her condition or treatment because of patient confidentiality, but he asserted that her care before being led into the cold was adequate and complete.
Suntha, who cited the hospital’s 136-year history of providing indigent care in Baltimore, said the woman’s insurance status or ability to pay played no role in the decision to discharge her.
Much remains unknown: Who the woman is, why she was hospitalized, what led staff to discharge her when she appeared to be incoherent. After Baraka called 911, paramedics arrived and took the woman back to the hospital.
Baraka did not respond to multiple requests for comment or post an update on his Facebook page, but he told The Baltimore Sun he had just left his office across the street when he came upon the scene and began filming. He said the woman’s mother contacted him and told him the hospital put her daughter, 22, in a cab and sent her to a homeless shelter. He said she is now recovering with her family, the Sun reported.
