Hospital discharges deaf non verbal autistic at 2AM

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How do you know she is safe? I have seen nothing about her being found or turning up. The longer a person is missing the better chance a bad outcome happened.

Putting aside disability what person in their right mind sends a women out in the street alone at 2AM without offering to call a cab? I think you said you worked in a bar. Is offering to call a cab for a customer you don’t know in the middle of the night not common practice in Vancouver?

Oops, missed the part where she hadn't turned up yet. That sucks. But still, like any other patient.. treated, discharged. Someone comes in with a sore leg they're not necessarily given a full psych evaluation to determine if they can make their way home. Could have just been a busy place.. leg treated, cya later.


No, it's not common practice to offer to call cabs for women or anyone at 2am. It does happen now and then if someone's being extra chivalrist, but it's not common practice at all - mostly because almost every single adult has had a cell phone in their pocket for the last ~25 years and can call themselves a taxi or friend or now Uber since Uber/Lyft etc finally became legal here a year or so ago.

Why would a woman, man, or almost anyone require someone else to phone a taxi for them? Unless they've had their phone lost/stolen and request that someone make a call for them, if someone needs a ride they simply make a phone call or click on an app. Pretty simple stuff.

Again we do not know a lot of the facts. It could be that they did offer her a cab but due to her disabilities the offer was made and she did not understand it or she did accept it but could not communicate it to the staff. So far nobody has said they called a cab which if they did the hospital’s PR staff would be eager to point out.

And they did give her a list of shelters. That’s good.

Rant:
That said I am completely floored by universal support for the hospital in this thread because people on this site are usually are very sympathetic and understanding of all disabilities. The attitudes on this thread are among the most cruel or tone deaf I have seen on disability related threads in my almost a decade here.

I have no idea what you all could be thinking.

I need to clear a few things up here.
I did mean any just any customer offering to call but the staff.

You are right in that when I went out in the ‘80s no uber or smart phones existed and maybe attitudes about guys calling women cabs have changed, I would not know.

And the streets of Canada were and are a lot safer then the streets of America.

But in the 80s if a women came in alone and they did not know if she had a car an offer to call a cab would be made. And many times a member of the staff would offer to walk a female customer to their car. Call it sexist, call it retrograde, call it whatever you like it was the right thing to do then and is the right thing to do now. It was and is arguably more dangerous today to be a woman alone then it is for guy.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 04 Jan 2023, 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

When I used the wheelchair transit service there was a special place at the hospital where disabled people waited for their ride (prearranged), or waited for taxis. There were telephones on the wall which connected directly to the cab companies so you wouldn't need a cell phone and you wouldn't even need to dial. The wheelchair vans and / or regular taxis came to that location for pickup. This was eight years ago but I've seen those wall telephones since.

Also when I go to hospital they always record how the person arrived on their chart. Example: Ambulance, ambulatory (walking), with family, etc., and the contact info of next of kin. Clearly this woman didn't need her next of kin to be notified when she discharged. I bet the fact that she arrived on her own by foot was recorded and she was seen as able-bodied and competent for leaving on her own, despite the sore leg.

It's really sad that she's missing and I hope she's found. Of course we all wish more could have been done for her, but I still don't think the hospital is legally responsible.

I do not know what accommodations that hospital has but I assume it is similar there. As a visitor I have used those. As a patient even for a procedure they made sure I had a ride.

I don’t know what they were legally obligated to do but lawyers are most of the problem are they not? Hospitals are overworked and understaffed and they do no more then they absolutely have to. When individual employees understandably do it, it is called quiet quitting and sneered at. When corporations do it, it is called due diligence. Companies used to pride themselves on customer service, now with the lawyers and the government involved that is too damn costly. This is unsustainable in the long term.

We could be thinking “Technically, we’re all disabled too & still most of us are fully capable of arranging rides for ourselves. Autism is an “invisible disability,” and hospital staff aren’t necessarily able to assess the extent of it in an individual complaining of a sore leg and can’t be expected to have somehow telepathically known that the patient in question wasn’t capable of finding their own way home like every other patient that’s discharged.”

Unless someone communicates to them that they need assistance arranging transportation home, how are they to know?

Skibum was really active in educating hospitals about autism.
I hope she doesn't mind me saying that.

I agree with both of you (ASP and GF).
It's horrible and regrettable and we can see where changes should be made.

Yes, lawyers get involved and wreck everything.
That family doesn't have a leg to stand on (no pun intended).

When I had my big stroke the ER doc tried to kick me out.
He saw my autistic behaviour and said I was faking my stroke.
He said I was drunk or stoned and ran a tox-screen rather than MRI.
This was a Tuesday afternoon and I was a highly-paid professional at the time.
It was a nurse who convinced him I needed to stay.
He wrote in my chart that I was "faking it".
The MRI showed a massive stroke.

What was I to do about that?
Sue a hospital?
I don't think so.

Addendum: Even if he had kicked me out, he wouldn't have arranged transportation.

Last edited by IsabellaLinton on 04 Jan 2023, 4:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I meant the staff.

Times change. 99%+ of people 19+ In a bar have a cell phone in their pocket. Unless it’s lost, stolen, or the battery dies staff don’t make offers to phone taxis. The only times staff proactively make offers to phone taxis are when someone is obviously way too drunk because they’ve been over served (illegally) and staff are making the offer of making a phone call for a ride in an attempt to limit their own legal liability for the person getting behind the wheel of a car themselves. Other than that, it’s 2023 not 1983 and people call/click for their own rides if they’re not taking public transportation or don’t have a designated driver.

Someone offering to call a taxi for someone would likely be viewed as odd since everyone has the ability yolk to call for their own ride unless they’re so drunk they can’t speak - which is very rare in a bar because it’s technically illegal to serve anyone enough alcohol to be drunk in a bar. (But that happens all the time, it’s just technically illegal and only becomes a legal issue when someone goes and crashes a car and then sues the bar and server for over serving them.)

It’s been 43 years since 1980. Times change. It’s not common to phone taxis for people. That was more of a thing during the days of pay phones, not cell phones.

The medical definition of non-verbal include any amount of speech that is outside the norm. I could have said semi-verbal, but it amounts to the same thing. As to her autism? Just how do you expect anyone to know she was autistic? The hospital she went to would have no way of knowing that.

A lot of people conflate non verbal with what was formally called mutism. Now there is a push to change non-verbal to non-speaking to be more accurate. People may not be able vocalize but can write their thoughts on their device as I found out when I had a trach installed for a year back in 2015-2016(then I described myself as nonverbal)

This woman apparently can not speak or hear, would that not be visable?

But they thought she needed a shelter, no insurance, just get rid of her.

Of course it would, but its not enough to automatically presume incompetence. (Unless you'd like all deaf people to be held until they can be released to the custody of a hearing person

Yes I agree ASP.

"Non-verbal" technically means the person doesn't understand receptive language (listening or reading), in addition to not having a capacity for speaking. I say I go non-verbal because people are used to that terminology but in my case it's selective mutism, even though it "selects" about 90% of the time. At those times I can't speak even when I want to. More accurately my condition should be called non-speaking.

Yes the hospital should / would have noticed she was deaf and non-speaking / mute. I'm surprised it wasn't in her health record but then again I forget your system is different in America. It hadn't even occurred to me that she wouldn't have insurance since I'm accustomed to all hospital care being free. What a nightmare for this woman. They really should have known she was at risk, or at least inquired when she left, especially given the severe winter storm.

When I'm in hospital it's usually some random nurse who finally gives me the discharge papers, rather than the doctor. Doctors walk away and vanish after a quick consult to write the prescription. Is it the same there, or who is your last point of contact? Do you have to check out at a payment desk or something? We don't.

I have been saying if she is willing make sure she has transportation to the shelter or wherever. If she is willing waiting until daybreak to discharge her would have been a good idea.

If she was willing to do anything but what she did, this never would have happened. No one forced her to leave her home at 4 am in the first place. She told her sister she wanted to go, her sister said no then left her alone to do as she pleased. You should also note that the family didn't even notice she was gone or report her as missing. If she had, there is a far better chance the hospital would have been aware of the fact she was a missing person. As would the police.