AN EXPENSIVE LESSON

The Inexcusable Death of a Jail Inmate Underscored Orange County's Responsibility to Provide Medical Attention for Anyone In Its Care.

Orange County paid a high price Tuesday to atone for a jail inmate's death.

The $3 million award, approved at the Orange County Commission meeting, settled a federal lawsuit brought by the family of Susan Bennett, who died a year ago while being held in the Orange County jail.

That amounted to 15 times what the county has paid in the past to settle a lawsuit.

But what happened to Mrs. Bennett, in jail for forging a prescription, defies financial evaluation.

An internal report by the county and a subsequent Sentinel investigation found that Mrs. Bennett, who was experiencing symptoms of withdrawal from methadone in the jail, suffered from vomiting and diarrhea for 12 days before she died.

During that time, Mrs. Bennett was under the supervision of a jail medical staff consisting of licensed nurses.

A medical examiner's report indicated, though, that Mrs. Bennett had been dead for several hours before medical staffers even realized that she had died.

After the county commission voted to settle the lawsuit, County Chairman Linda Chapin said the ``nurses were derelict in their duty to their patient, to their employer and to their profession.''

That's an understatement. Had the nurses followed their basic professional training - to monitor and record the condition of a patient accurately and reliably - Mrs. Bennett might be alive today.

Mrs. Chapin conceded that the ``climate'' in the jail's medical department lacked compassion for the inmates. Defending the actions of those nurses in court, she rightly observed, would have been difficult.

Though the nurses directly involved in the case have resigned or been fired, the medical department clearly had a chronic management problem.

What good is a medical department in which the workers lack compassion and don't follow basic standards of performance?

Those standards certainly apply to treating jail inmates. The government has moral and legal obligations to provide basic medical attention for anyone involuntarily in its care.

It was a failure of the jail administration to honor those obligations that cost Orange County $3 million. The award easily could have been millions of dollars more had the case gone to court, which is why commissioners correctly decided to settle.

Taxpayers - and all people with an ounce of compassion - have a right to be furious. The tragedy of Susan Bennett's death should have been avoided.

Jail managers blame chronic staff shortages in the medical department for some of the lapses in Mrs. Bennett's treatment. Today a quarter of 36 positions in that department remain vacant. Temporary services provide fill-in nurses as a stop-gap measure. Officials say it's difficult to recruit and retain licensed nurses, because many hospitals can offer more lucrative compensation packages than anything the county can provide.

The staff shortage, though, is not new and could be resolved by contracting with a private company to provide medical services, the approach used in almost all of Florida's large county jails.

Now Orange County has decided to seek an outside company to provide that service. Contractors will have the freedom to offer more attractive pay and benefits than that commonly available to county employees.

That approach likely will cost more than the $6 million the county now spends on the jail medical department. The expense will be justified, though, if it protects the health of prisoners in the county's care and protects the wallets of taxpayers from lawsuits involving the medical treatment of inmates.

This has been a sordid and tragic experience - certainly for Mrs. Bennett and now for Orange County.

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Prisoner Died As Nurses Sat By

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