‘Nightmare’ heat at Oak Park hospital, too, after patients moved from Weiss

When temperatures inside Weiss Memorial Hospital in Uptown rose to 90 degrees early last week, Harold O’Connell and 21 other patients were transferred to Weiss’ sister hospital, West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park.

But West Suburban became just as hot as Weiss, Harold O’Connell’s daughter Diane told the Chicago Sun-Times. His family bought a fan and a thermostat for his room, and over the next five days they saw temperatures rise from 80 degrees to 88 degrees by Monday, she said.

“It was a nightmare,” Diane O’Connell said. “They had some very vulnerable people and took them out of a bad situation and put them into an even worse situation on purpose.”

Diane O’Connell was already worried when she learned her 83-year-old dad had been taken to Weiss Memorial Hospital with pneumonia earlier this month. As an attorney who used to work with Chicago’s homeless population, clients of hers had died at the hospital.

But she was happy with the care her dad was getting. He was constantly checked on and his health improved. He was eventually able to sit up and read the paper and join a family Zoom for Father’s Day.

Then the heat came. On June 17, Weiss evacuated its entire inpatient unit after failing to fix the hospital’s air conditioning system as temperatures inside the building rose to 90 degrees and the first heat wave of the year moved into the city.

Hospital leaders blamed the problem on an aging air conditioning system that had not been maintained by previous owners, which forced the 239-bed acute care hospital to transfer or discharge 45 patients. The AC may not be fixed for two more weeks, they said.

During his transfer, Harold O’Connell was restrained, his daughter said, and without his family there, he was confused and scared. He was put in an unused wing of the hospital and was not seen by a doctor for 30 hours, she said. It also took that long for him to be put back on antibiotics and on a feeding tube. He also started to hallucinate.

As the heat index in the city rose, hospital staff placed massive AC units in the hallways last week to try to cool down the rooms in the hospital. But they only made the floor hotter because the hot air produced by the units wasn’t filtered out, Diane O’Connell said.

“The staff were friendly and sympathetic. They did what they could, but they were overwhelmed and working 12-hour shifts in 90-degree heat,” O’Connell said.

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A thermostat that Harold O’Connell’s family purchased and placed in his room at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park. The temperature inside was 88 degrees.

Provided

O’Connell said she did everything to get her dad care and get him out of the hospital. She alerted the hospital’s compliance officer and filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Public Health. She tried to arrange a transfer to a hospital in the city so that her mom could easily visit her dad.

“I’m an attorney. I was advocating my ass off,” Diane O’Connell said.

But dealing with the hospital made it nearly impossible to get her dad help, she said. A doctor only visited her dad twice — for less than five minutes, she said. And they wouldn’t let his family bring him to the lobby where it was cooler than his room on the fourth floor, she said.

“Nobody was trying to help us figure this out and get out of there,” O’Connell said.

A statement from Resilience Healthcare, which owns the two hospitals, acknowledged that some areas of West Suburban are “warm.”

“Currently, a maintenance employee is walking the building and manually taking temperatures in every department with the proper equipment,” the statement said. “The unit that became extremely hot yesterday has had all of the patients removed off of that unit and into a different unit. Rooms that are above temperatures on the open units remain empty.”

The statement said “spot coolers” have been “strategically placed” to help with the heat and humidity. While some of the units are working, one of the units is operating “below capacity.”

Diane O’Connell and her family was finally able to get her dad out of the hospital Monday night. They brought him home to her parents’ Edgewater apartment. His condition is improving, and he’s off antibiotics. But she said he’s traumatized and needs a doctor to check on him.

“Unless he gets worse, we are not going back to a hospital,” O’Connell said.

Staff at Weiss first realized the AC had an issue this month. They discovered that three of the four AC units were not working when they began transitioning from heating the hospital to cooling it.

“Patient safety and patient comfort definitely comes first for us,” Dr. Manoj Prasad, the hospital’s owner and CEO, told reporters June 18..

Technicians are working on repairing the systems. One unit has been fixed, but the two remaining require parts that need to be ordered.

While Prasad couldn’t share a specific date, he said he hopes the hospital will be back open in about two weeks.

Weiss Memorial Hospital

Exterior of Weiss Memorial Hospital, Friday March 20, 2020. | Brian Rich/Sun-Times

Brian Rich/Sun-Times file

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