Nurse accuses El Paso doctors of neglecting COVID-19 patients

The nurse claimed some doctors won't enter rooms with COVID-19 positive patients

Nov 14, 2020

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Lawanna Rivers, a traveling registered nurse is calling out the University Medical Center in El Paso claiming the hospital is not doing enough to save lives. Her criticism was mainly directed at doctors, claiming some won’t administer care to COVID-19 positive patients.

“We as nurses, it’s okay for us to be exposed but you as doctors, you do not even come in there,” Rivers said. “You can’t get exposed but we can, and y’all are the ones making all the money.”

According to ABC7, Rivers also claims that UMC does not do enough to help critical patients. She referenced patients coding and UMC not having a strict enough CPR procedure.

“The hospital’s policy was they only get three rounds of CPR which was only six minutes, this out of all the codes we had, there is not a single patient that made it,” Rivers said.

She alleged that preferential treatment of a doctor’s wife led to the woman’s survival. “The nurse that oriented me had one patient, and she was called the ‘VIP’ patient. She was a doctor’s wife. And when I say they pulled out all the stops for that woman, it was nothing that they didn’t do for that woman, and guess what? She was the one patient that made it out of the ICU alive.”

I'm not giving any business in El Paso any of my money. I am going on a personal strike. They don't care about the strain that is being put on our hospitals, doctors and nurses.
— Marian Ali (@mali3733) November 14, 2020

Along with the capacity issues all area hospitals have to deal with and the long hours staff are required to work, Rivers felt additional pressure when speaking with family members inquiring about patients.

“To have family members call you night after night for an update, like anything was going to be different was horrific,” Rivers said. “To know that the only way those patients was coming out of that pit was in a body bag, I am not okay from an emotional and mental standpoint.”

EMS medics transport a man with possible Covid-19 symptoms to the hospital on August 07, 2020 in Austin, Texas. Nationwide the African American community continues to be disproportionally affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Austin-Travis County EMS has seen the number of new hospitalizations decrease, even as Covid-19 deaths continue. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

After ABC-7 reached out to UMC for a response to the allegations, they issued a statement saying they could not verify the events Ms. Rivers expressed. They said they empathized and sympathized with thousands of health care workers for the physical and emotional toll that is a result of the pandemic.

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