{"id":41726,"date":"2024-02-05T21:09:59","date_gmt":"2024-02-06T02:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=41726"},"modified":"2024-02-05T21:10:06","modified_gmt":"2024-02-06T02:10:06","slug":"hospitals-throughout-florida-are-dumping-patients-in-lakeland-using-uber-or-lyft-lakeland-homeless-shelter-faces-escalating-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2024\/02\/05\/hospitals-throughout-florida-are-dumping-patients-in-lakeland-using-uber-or-lyft-lakeland-homeless-shelter-faces-escalating-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospitals throughout Florida are dumping patients in Lakeland using Uber or Lyft Lakeland homeless shelter faces escalating crisis!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A homeless services provider in Polk County is overwhelmed with patients being dumped on their doorsteps by hospitals all across Florida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Talbot House Ministries in&nbsp;Lakeland&nbsp;told us that this is an escalating crisis and there needs to be a solution.<\/p>\n\n\n        \n        <div class=\"embedpress-gutenberg-wrapper source-provider-Youtube aligncenter ep-clear   ep-content-protection-disabled inline\" id=\"638ff26b-596e-4b24-b977-130b351d653f\" data-embed-type=\"Youtube \">\n            <div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper \">\n                <div id=\"ep-gutenberg-content-92b15e7c23d7c26eda7e8e8148a6e7e9\" class=\"ep-gutenberg-content\">\n                    <div >\n                        <div class=\"ep-embed-content-wraper preset-default insta-grid ep-google-photos-carousel\"\n                            style=\"max-width:600px;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto\"                                                                                                                >\n\n                            <div class=\"ose-youtube ose-uid-4d0b7e3a24bc8b118d4b8097797e0ada ose-embedpress-responsive\" style=\"width:600px; height:340px; max-height:340px; max-width:100%; display:inline-block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowFullScreen=\"true\" title=\"Disabled and Homeless being dumped in Lakeland FL Lakeland Police Body Cam Footage\" width=\"600\" height=\"340\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-rjUQLOvmJc?feature=oembed&#038;color=red&#038;rel=1&#038;controls=2&#038;start=true&#038;end=true&#038;fs=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;autoplay=0&#038;modestbranding=0&#038;cc_load_policy=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; encrypted-media;accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;gyroscope;picture-in-picture clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen title=\"Hospitals throughout Florida are dumping patients in Lakeland using Uber or Lyft Lakeland homeless shelter faces escalating crisis!\"><\/iframe><\/div>                        <\/div>\n\n                                            <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n    \n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Body camera video from the Lakeland Police Department, dated January 10, shows an Uber driver dropping off a wheelchair-bound man at Talbot House. The man, who came from a mental health facility in Wesley Chapel that paid for his Uber, can be heard telling the officer he did not request to come to the shelter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Did you want them to displace you from where you were?&#8221; The officer is heard asking on the body cam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The man responded, &#8220;No, I did not.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hospital patient dumping is when hospitals leave patients at local shelters, sometimes without the patient&#8217;s or the shelter&#8217;s consent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;They say they&#8217;ve called us, and we haven&#8217;t received a call. They tell them there&#8217;s going to be a bed waiting for them, but there&#8217;s no bed. They show up at our door,&#8221; said Deborah Cozzetti, director of programs at Talbot House Ministries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The incidents, like the one in the body cam video, happen numerous times a week, and it&#8217;s become a growing crisis because they don&#8217;t have the medical capabilities to care for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Then we end up having to send them back to the hospital and there&#8217;s this revolving door going back and forth, and it&#8217;s not fair to the patient,&#8221; said Cozzetti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Their shelter is currently over capacity by 140%. They said this problem has been happening over the last several years but has gotten much worse since the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;It just really breaks your heart to see people that old, and even young people that come. We had 18-year-olds that were here. It&#8217;s heartbreaking when we have individuals that come here, and they have nowhere to go,&#8221; said Angelina Ligon, the case management supervisor at Talbot House Ministries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The man in the body cam video was taken to a local hospital for medical treatment and the Uber driver learned an important lesson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Make sure you&#8217;re verifying information before you transport people, because it could be kidnapping if he doesn&#8217;t want to be in your car, and you&#8217;re moving him from one place to another place. Ok?&#8221; The officer told the Uber driver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Talbot House Ministries can help who they can, but Cozzetti said city, county, and government officials need to come up with a better solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Maybe we can be a model for the nation. This is what happened in Polk County, and maybe we can do it in our county too. Because people are being mistreated,&#8221; Cozzetti said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Talbot House Ministries didn&#8217;t want to mention any hospitals by name, but they hope this story will raise enough awareness and that the hospitals will stop dumping patients permanently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A homeless services provider in Polk County is overwhelmed with patients being dumped on their doorsteps by hospitals all across Florida. Talbot House Ministries in&nbsp;Lakeland&nbsp;told us that this is an&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[7473],"class_list":["post-41726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","category-news","tag-hospitals-throughout-florida-are-dumping-patients-in-lakeland"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}