Adrian Schoolcraft Whistleblower Retaliation Update - The Snake Pit

Queens District Attorney Rules That No Crime Took Place When NYPD Retaliated Against Whistleblower Cop Adrian Schoolcraft By Throwing Him In The Psych Ward Of Jamaica Hospital. Only In New York, Kids, Only In New York.

From NYPD Confidential :

Neither the NYPD nor Jamaica Hospital committed a crime when they forcibly took whistleblower cop Adrian Schoolcraft from his home and held him in the hospital’s psych ward against his will for three days.

If you are a whistleblower, how the NYPD treats you is by labeling you an emotionally disturbed person [EDP], and then by throwing you in the Snake Pit.

So says Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, whose office conducted a criminal investigation of the incident together with the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

According to a draft report, which was obtained by NYPD Confidential, Brown concluded that both the police and the hospital doctors acted reasonably because they believed Schoolcraft to be an emotionally disturbed person [EDP]. ...

Read more : DA: No Crime to Throw Cop Whistleblower in Psych Ward

No word, yet, if New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has an opinion about the injustice facing Mr. Schoolcraft. :'(

Long waits, overcrowding now expected following St. Vincent's Hospital closing

Quoted entirely from FierceHleathcare:

Long waits, overcrowding result from Queens hospital closings; a harbinger of St. Vincent's fallout?

May 25, 2010 — 11:08am ET | By Dan Bowman

Hospitals in Manhattan worried about the impact of closing hospitals like St. Vincent's need only look to neighboring borough Queens to see the effect hospital closures can have on a community. Three hospital closures in two years--Parkway Hospital (251 beds) in 2008 and the simultaneous closings of St. John's Hospital and Mary Immaculate Hospital (422 combined beds) in February 2009--have resulted in 17-hour wait times at one facility, and patients receiving emergency care in a hospital café at a second, reports The Wall Street Journal.

"If you want to think you're in a war-torn third-world country, just go to the ER at New York Hospital Queens on a Friday afternoon, Dr. Paul Aaronson, president of the Queens County Medical Society, told the Journal.

While Queens already was in bad shape before the closings--with the lowest ratio of beds to population of any of the five boroughs according to Greater New York Hospital Association president Kenneth Raske--the closings created a new level of misery for patients and caregivers alike. In 2008, the American Hospital Association reported that Queens hospitals had only 1.7 beds for every 1,000 patients, down 32.5 percent after the closings took place.

Emil Silberman, associate director of the Emergency Medicine Department at Jamaica Hospital, said that his facility, which was made to treat 60,000 patients annually, currently treats more than double that number--135,000 per year. As such, nurses like Larisa Kolyuyeva see as many as 28 patients in a 12-hour shift, more than double the average workload prior to the closings, the newspaper reports.

And such numbers aren't likely to improve, with emergency room visits expected to increase under reform, according to a survey from the American College of Emergency Physicians. Becker's Hospital Review lists ER closures as one of six reasons why overcrowding is likely to continue.

To learn more:
- check out this Wall Street Journal article
- here's the Becker's piece