Laura Levis died of an asthma attack right outside the Somerville Hospital emergency room in 2016. She couldn't find the correct entrance and wasn't located by hospital employees after she called 911.
Hospitals in Massachusetts will soon have to implement changes to make it easier for someone experiencing a medical crisis to find a hospital's emergency room and get help there.were announced Thursday at a State House press conference by Peter DeMarco, whose wife, Laura Levis, died from an asthma attack outside Somerville Hospital in September 2016. Levis couldn’t find her way to the emergency department and couldn’t find anyone to help her. She was 34.
After Levis died, DeMarco turned from his career in journalism — he was a correspondent at The Boston Globe — to activism. For the past four years, he worked to get a new state law passed, which led to the regulations; he hopes they'll keep someone else from dying outside a hospital because they couldn't get help.
On the obstacles his wife faced as she sought help at Somerville Hospital during her medical emergency: "There was no lighted emergency sign any door for her to have followed. So without that sign, she went to the wrong door, and that was locked.
On the recommendations drawn up with the help of the working group he formed, which included architects, lighting experts, a wayfinding expert and people with disabilities: the Department of Public Health saying, here are the steps you need to take to make your emergency departments safer, to make them easy to find, to make them easy to get inside, and to eliminate as much confusion as possible for patients.
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