More Fraud and Abuse Uncovered At Kings County Hospital

This is definitely a dangerous and disturbing trend. Kings County Hospital, one of the 11 HHC hospitals that are under fire for underreporting bad outcomes and repeatedly engaging in fraudulent activities and recordkeeping and which was previously under fire for its despicable handling of the Esmin Green incident, now faces a similar tale of woe from another mentally ill patient.

Records indicate that the patient was in fine shape while waiting for treatment. The truth is another matter altogether.

Day after day, the mentally retarded autistic 18-year-old - labeled in internal reports as Patient GB - lived inside the waiting room of the hospital's emergency room.

He was not officially registered as a patient, although staff members repeatedly wrote inrecords that he was okay.

"Every 15 minutes there's an entry stating he was there sitting in the waiting room . . . that he was fine," said a source familiar with the case.

One of those reassuring notations was entered into the records at the same time Patient GB was found in a bathroom, forced to perform oral sex on another patient.

The reassuring record was a lie.

When investigators checked what records existed for Patient GB, they discovered hospital employees had made numerous entries in logbooks that were contradicted by videos of the waiting room showing the teenager wasn't where they had claimed he was and nobody was checking on him.

After the state was notified, the boy's mother picked him up and brought him back home. The mother declined to discuss the incident.

People going to hospitals are doing so to receive care and respectful treatment for their ailments. This patient received none. You hope that when you go to a hospital, you are in a safe environment where you do not have to worry about being sexually assaulted.

That, sadly, is not the case here either.

This patient was abused by the lax security, the inattentive staff, and then the fraudulent coverup by staffers.

In other words, none of the lessons from the Esmin Green incident were internalized. The hospital continued to lie about the treatment of its patients - engaging in wholesale fraud and deception.

Then, there's the whole issue of overcrowding at the hospital, despite the fact that there are state laws prohibiting keeping patients in the emergency room for days at a time. All this points to an ongoing culture of insensitivity and inability to abide by state laws. Moreover, it is criminal the way that the hospital treats the mentally ill - those people who are most at risk of being abused by the system because they cannot speak for themselves.

It also shows that state oversight is lacking since the overcrowding issues would have been addressed long ago had anyone bothered to note.

Where is the accountability? The Daily News notes that the fraudulent recordkeeping would only be an issue every few months if a bad outcome occurred, but yet there's little evidence that anything changed in the culture at the hospital to end the practice altogether. If anything, it shows that there was a deeply ingrained culture of deception at the hospital that went up the chain of command to the highest levels despite claims that they would change how business is done at the hospital.

Clearly, nothing has been done to address the systemic failures at this hospital. Heads must roll both at the hospital and within the HHC for the massive coverup and fraudulent records.