PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) – A man driving himself to an emergency room at night crashed his car in the hospital’s parking garage, then had to wait for an ambulance to take him to the ER where he died early on Thursday, police said.
A Portland Adventist Medical Center official said the ambulance arrived within minutes of being called by the two police officers who were first on the scene.
But the incident prompted Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat whose congressional district includes the hospital, to call for an investigation by state medical authorities into whether Portland Adventist wasted precious time.
The driver, Birgilio Marin-Fuentes, 61, already had gone unattended in the hospital garage for some 20 minutes after his crash before a passerby discovered him there and alerted the two officers, who were in the hospital on other business.
The two found Marin-Fuentis “unresponsive,” said Kelli Sheffer, a Portland Police Bureau spokeswoman.
One officer performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation while the other ran back into the hospital for help but was told that hospital procedures required he call an ambulance, Sheffer said. She said both officers performed CPR for about six minutes until the ambulance arrived and took Marin-Fuentes to the hospital’s ER.
A Portland Adventist official, David Russell, said the hospital did not have a policy against responding to emergencies in its own parking lot.
“In fact, we always call 911 and send our own staff into these situations whether they are gunshot wounds, heart attacks or any other medical emergency. And we have done that many times in the past year alone,” Russell, hospital vice president of the business development, said in a written statement.
“We advised the officer immediately call 911 because EMS have the mobile equipment to respond to a car accident,” he said. “Before the officer left our emergency department, our charge nurse directed a paramedic to go immediately to the scene.” The charge nurse also dispatched “first responders” to the scene, he said.
Marin-Fuentes was pronounced dead at 1:22 a.m., said Damon O’Brien, deputy coroner in the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s office. “He died of heart disease. There was no trauma.”
Russell said about eight minutes elapsed from the time the first police officer came into the ER and the patient arrived – Yahoo News
