Two years after his wife died of an asthma attack mere feet outside a locked emergency room door, the hospital has apologized in person to a bereaved Massachusetts husband.
Patrick Wardell, CEO of Cambridge Health Alliance, told Peter DeMarco during a two-hour meeting at the headquarters of The Boston Globe on Tuesday that he was ‘very sorry’ for what happened.
DeMarco’s wife, Laura Levis, walked to CHA Somerville Hospital in the midst of a sever asthma attack, found one ER door locked, then collapsed while on the phone with a 911 operator, just outside the second door.
After initially publishing an open thank you letter to the staff in the New York Times, DeMarco then learned the circumstances of Levis’s death and wrote a devastating account of the failures that led to her death in the Boston Globe Magazine.
Ten days after DeMarco published his heart-breaking account, he has accepted its apology, but was still left with unanswered questions.
Patrick Wardell, CEO of Cambridge Health Alliance (left), met with Peter DeMarco (right) on Tuesday to apologize for his wife’s death outside the doors of the company’s hospitals (AP)
‘I can understand the horrible pain that this has inflicted upon you,’ Wardell said in the Tuesday meeting.
DeMarco, a journalist, met with several hospital officials, including Chief Medical Officer Dr Assaad Sayah, of Somerville Hospital.
‘It’s hard to continue saying we failed, but we did fail,’ Dr Sayah said at the meeting.
DeMarco’s heart-wrenching first-person account of the death of his wife, Laura Levis, appeared in The Boston Globe magazine.
Levis, having an asthma attack, walked to Somerville Hospital’s emergency room early on Sept. 16, 2016.
She found the door locked. There were instructions posted on that door to use another entrance instead.
Perhaps because she was panicking, she did not see or could not understand those instructions, or she just didn’t make it in time. She sat down on a bench, called 911 and told the operator she was outside the hospital emergency room, couldn’t get in and was dying.
DeMarco and Levis were living separately when she died. He didn’t know that his wife had tried to call 911 and waited 10 minutes for help until after she had been taken off life support
Dispatchers for 911 calls ask callers where their emergencies are and use cell towers to ping phones to try to get locations. Levis tried the one entrance (A) but it was locked. She nearly made it to the second (B), but collapsed on a bench (star). Pings to her cell phone (red) suggested she was much further, at one of two far corners of the hospital’s grounds
The 911 operators and their geolocation technologies failed to find Laura, as did hospital staff.
At one point, a nurse poked her head out of a door, looked for Laura outside for 12 seconds, but apparently didn’t see her in the predawn gloom.
Though DeMarco’s moving account exposes a series of systematic failures on the parts of a number of institutions, that fact that that nurse missed the outline of Laura’s body, so near to the door, has remained a sticking point for DeMarco.
Laura was eventually found unresponsive by a firefighter on the bench 29 feet from main entrance. She died at another hospital days later.
DeMarco said that although he accepted Wardell’s apology, he was not satisfied with all the hospital officials’ answers.
Dr Assaad Sayah, chief medical officer of Cambridge Health Alliance, right, embraces Pete DeMarco Nov. 13, 2018 after a meeting where he and other executives answered questions about the death of DeMarco’s wife, Laura Levis, in Boston (Boston Globe/AP)
The mistakes that led to Laura’s death were so unnecessary. For the hospital to own up to them couldn’t have been more necessary,’ DeMarco said in an email to The Associated Press.
‘I was certainly disappointed with some answers, and disappointed to learn that Somerville Hospital’s leaders have never spoken with the emergency room nurse who left Laura to die on a bench steps from the hospital’s doors,’ he said.
DeMarco said he was also pleased with Wardell’s pledge to share the story of his wife’s death with other hospitals to help them learn from Somerville Hospital’s mistakes.
DeMarco has no plans to sue the hospital, which he said now keeps both emergency room doors unlocked.
Hospital officials learned from their investigation into Levis’ case and made several changes, including improving lighting, signage, video surveillance, and training for employees, Dr Sayah said.
Wardell shook DeMarco’s hand at the end of Tuesday’s meeting. Dr Sayah and chief nursing officer Lynette Alberti both hugged DeMarco.