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It’s called “patient dumping,” and it happens more than you think.

Transcription:

This man caught a hospital leaving a patient on the street in the freezing cold.

“Wait, so ya’ll are just gonna leave this lady out here with no clothes on?”

Imamu Baraka was walking past a Baltimore hospital when he noticed hospital workers wheeling a patient to a bus stop.

The woman was left wearing only a hospital gown and socks.

“Are you OK, ma’am? Do you need me to call the police?”

“This is disgusting that they would just leave her unattended on a bus stop half-naked.”

Baraka eventually called 911, and paramedics took the patient back to the same hospital.

This isn’t the first hospital to be caught doing this.

Nearly 1,000 similar cases were investigated in Illinois last year, and hospitals in Los Angeles have been accused of dumping people on the street for years.

“It just appears as though, as I was talking to the ambulance driver, that this is a norm. Where individuals who are “unruly,” are left on the street to sort of fend for themselves.”

It’s a practice known as “patient dumping,” when a hospital refuses to treat a person who’s unable to pay or difficult to treat.

It often happens to patients who are uninsured, homeless or have a mental illness.

“I am still looking at this and I am really wondering as to what’s going to happen here. I’m disgusted by the display, or the lack of empathy that I am seeing displayed.”

The hospital released a statement after Baraka’s videos went viral:

“While there are many circumstances of this patient’s case that we cannot address publicly, in the end we clearly failed to fulfill our mission with this patient.” – The University of Maryland Medical System

The hospital also says a review of the incident is now in progress.

Though the exact circumstances of the case in Baltimore are unclear, no one should be treated this way.

Originally published: January 11, 2018
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