Man burned, wait an hour to call for help?

Workers at a state-run center for the mentally retarded waited for more than an hour to call for help after discovering a patient had been severely burned.

The patient, Rutherford “Rudy” Wallace, 35, was given a bath in a tub with a malfunctioning water valve, and workers didn’t check the water temperature by hand, Department of Mental Health officials said Tuesday.

On Wednesday, agency spokesman Bob Bax confirmed that workers knew of the injuries by 10:10 p.m. But nobody called 911. Instead, workers waited until 11:22 p.m. — more than an hour later — to call a private ambulance company.

Wallace was taken to St. John’s Mercy Medical Center’s burn unit with second- and third-degree burns — burns so deep his mother said his skin was peeling off. Immediate treatment is critical in such burn cases, said Dr. Douglas Char, a Washington University emergency medicine physician.

While not familiar with the Wallace case, Char said severe burns can suck fluids out of the body, stressing the heart and kidneys, and the lack of skin opens the body to infection. That’s why a burn victim quickly needs intravenous fluids and antibiotics. He also said the type of burns Wallace had would be hard to miss.

“That means that 30 percent of his body is hot, red, is weeping (fluids),” he said. “You’d know it was a significant burn ... almost immediately.”

Three minutes after the ambulance left with Wallace, a nurse at the center phoned Wallace’s mother, Linda Harris, and left a voice-mail message telling her that “Rudy had a little .. uh .. accident” and that he was being taken to a hospital. Police weren’t called until about 1:30 a.m., and it was the hospital that called.

Bax said that Mental Health Department investigators are still looking into why it took so long for center workers to call for help, and why they didn’t dial 911 — agency protocol for life-threatening injuries.

This is awful. Article here.