DEAR EDITOR: I am responding to your editorial in The Sentinel.
I can only speak to a particular time when an ambulance came to transport a patient from the Anschutz Medical Center around the building to the UCH emergency room.
The patient was my 89-year-old mother. She fell in a downstairs women’s restroom at the medical center. I was unable to lift her, and she was screaming in pain and terror.
It did seem strange that we had to have an ambulance transfer her, but what alternative was there? Take her in a gurney screaming through the inside long hallway that connects the two buildings? And who would do that? How would she be monitored in the process?
UCH would have to come up with a protocol for such a transfer that would involve multiple personnel and technical equipment to be on call. And given the large number of people often in that long hallway, whose safety would also need to be considered, the ambulance route might even be faster. I don’t understand your slap at homeless people in this regard.
Any patient, any age, homeless or not, who is deemed to need emergency help at any doctor’s office should be transported in the quickest, safest way possible. It doesn’t matter if that office is a mile away from the ER or just around the corner. Thank you for considering another opinion than the one in your article.
— Susan Greenwood, Aurora, via letters@SentinelColorado.com