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Friday, January 22, 2010

Rivera's family to sue Aria

In a move that will likely surprise no one, the family of the late Latino musician Joaquin Rivera is preparing to sue Aria Health System.
“We are now on the cusp of filing a civil lawsuit,” Tom Kline, the family’s attorney, said last night.
Rivera’s family was emboldened by a report that was released Thursday by the state Department of Health detailing numerous staff policy violations that occurred on Nov. 28, the night Rivera had a fatal heart attack in the waiting room of Aria Health’s Frankford campus.
Rivera, 63, sat dead for more than 40 minutes and was robbed by three vagrants before hospital personnel noticed.
The list of hospital errors that took place before, during and after his death was extensive, state investigators found.
While Rivera’s friends and relatives had already assumed as much, having their suspicions confirmed in the stark report reopened old wounds.
“Reading about it this morning, it was emotional,” Rivera’s longtime friend Joe Garcia, president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, said yesterday.
“Joaquin’s friends all over the country were in communication about it. We’re in pain. We’re still mourning.”
Rivera, a father of three who worked for years as a guidance counselor at Olney High School, complained of pain on his left side when he entered the hospital, on Frankford Avenue near Harrison Street, at 10:45 p.m.
Surveillance footage showed that he stopped moving 11 minutes later. According to the state report, a triage nurse called his name at 11:03 p.m. and noticed that he was staring at a wall and not moving.
However, neither the nurse nor other hospital personnel checked to see if Rivera was in need of help, the report shows.
The triage nurse didn’t set foot inside the waiting room between 10:45 p.m. and 11:47 p.m., the report shows, and staffers responded to Rivera only when another patient said that he had died.
Aria suspended a triage nurse and registrar who offered conflicting accounts of the night.
State investigators learned in subsequent interviews with the hospital staff that many were unaware of protocol that requires them to check on patients in the waiting area.

The state blamed Aria administrators for not properly informing the nursing staff of the hospital’s policies.
City Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, a close friend of Rivera’s, said the state’s findings left her disappointed with Aria administrators, whom she said had previously been “somewhat forthcoming” about what transpired.
“They were putting a lot of responsibility on the frontline staff without making sure they have proper training,” she said.
Sanchez noted that City Council will hold a hearing on the case on Feb. 2. The focus will include a “broader discussion” about practices and policies in other city emergency departments, she said.
In an e-mailed statement, Aria Health officials noted that the hospital has increased security at Frankford by more than 30 percent.
The hospital has examined its emergency triage service and emphasized better communication between its registrars and triage nurses, the statement said.
“There’s no good spin that Aria can put on the events that happened the night Joaquin Rivera died,” Kline said. “We intend to hold Aria accountable.”
Posted by David Gambacorta @ 11:24 PM  Permalink | 3 comments
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  • Comment removed.
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 9:43 AM, 01/23/2010
    SPEAKING OF GOOD FAMILIES SUING TO BRING ABOUT CHANGE... What about all the Surviving Murder Victim Families and Crime Victims suing the State in Federal Court for all their losses..."The Rendell Murders"! Since 2003, Rendell has released ABOUT 100,000 Stone Thugs/State Prison Inmates AND NOT returned them to prison for SERIOUS PAROLE VIOLATIONS to save over $63 MILLION in State Budget Funds for his "NO Bid and Inappropriate Contracts" to Champaign Contributors, his Law Firm, and "Friends". That's $39,000 per inmate per year! And how we have BLED in order to line his pockets! Think about it... the bottomline in the INQUIRE series on Courts, Bail, Witness Intimidation and Guns.. even the DA's Office = STATE PAROLEES! We have 1/6th the population of New York City, but 6 TIMES THE CRIME... WHY? STATE PAROLEES! "Killadelphia" is the largest OPEN AIR PRISON IN AMERICA AND 1st in COP KILLINGS! Every time you hear a gun shot in Philadelphia... odds are... it's a STATE PAROLEE behind the trigger! PLEASE ENCOURAGE ALL CRIME VICTIMS AND THEIR FAMILIES TO CONTACT A LAWYER REGARDING THEIR LOSS... IT'S THE ONLY WAY THINGS WILL GET BETTER. THE NEXT STATE PAROLEE MURDER VICTIM... IS VERY CERTAIN AND VERY SOON NOW.
    — John Law
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 11:40 AM, 01/23/2010
    Hope that Aria asks for and gets a change of venue. Idiot Philadelphia juries think it is free money that they are giving away.
    — Smokey


3 comments
About The PhillyConfidential team

Dana DiFilippo has covered murder, mayhem and miscellany at the Daily News since 2000. She grew up in Delaware County and studied journalism and photography at Penn State University. E-mail tips to difilid@phillynews.com.

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Stephanie Farr has been reporting for the Daily News since 2007, covering everything from gay porn stars who entered the burglary business to moon trees, skinheads, murders and naked bike rides. She covers crime, both in the city and suburbs, and keeps clippings of bizarre Associated Press articles. Her favorite this year was the story about the drunk in Punxsutawney who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dead opossum. E-mail tips to farrs@phillynews.com.

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Phillip Lucas joined the Daily News crime team in 2011. He grew up on the mean streets of Seattle and studied journalism and psychology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Before landing in the City of Brotherly Love, Phillip was a reporter for The News Journal in Wilmington, Del. Email tips to lucasp@phillynews.com.

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Morgan Zalot is the newest crime reporter at the Daily News, starting in 2011 after interning at the paper twice as a Temple University journalism student. In her past stints at the DN, she covered just about everything, from drunken Phillies fans to a barber shop in a high school to a grisly murder-suicide. She’s a born-and-raised Philly girl who grew up in the Northeast. E-mail tips to zalotm@philly.com.

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