NYC patient found dead in stairwell to health clinic. She'd been there for days.

NEW YORK — A longtime patient who fought against a consolidation plan involving Montefiore’s Family Health Center in the Bronx died in a stairwell to the facility last week but wasn’t discovered until five days later, according to the NYPD and community organizers.

Sary Mao, a 57-year-old woman who lived in a group home in the Bronx, was found unconscious and unresponsive Monday after someone reported a “foul odor” coming from the building’s emergency stairwell, an NYPD spokesperson said. A preliminary police investigation found she fell and died the previous Wednesday but no criminality was suspected.

The cause of death was hypertensive cardiovascular disease, a spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said.

Mao, a Khmer-speaking Cambodian refugee, had participated in a campaign last year to stop Montefiore from consolidating the Family Health Center and two other Bronx clinics, according to organizers with the advocacy group Mekong NYC, which focuses on issues affecting the Bronx's Southeast Asian community.

“We have lots of questions about how her death happened," Mekong NYC said in a statement to POLITICO. “We demand answers and transparency from Montefiore, and will hold the Hospital accountable so that our communities are safe — and not in further danger — when placed in Montefiore's care.”

Since Montefiore implemented the consolidation plan last fall, current and former employees said the Family Health Center’s waiting rooms have been overcrowded and patients are waiting longer to be seen. As a result, medical emergencies or other patient incidents that unfold outside exam rooms are more likely to go unnoticed, the three employees said. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

“I think it could’ve been avoided if someone was paying attention,” said a former Family Health Center nursing employee who worked there during the consolidation.

Two employees said the incident reminded them of the 2015 death of a Montefiore employee who was found in a locked bathroom on the health system’s Einstein campus four days after disappearing from the emergency room.

A current employee said the door to the stairwell where Mao was found is marked with an “emergency exit” sign in English but no other languages, even though the clinic sees many patients with limited English proficiency. The center’s staff have been fighting for decades to improve access to interpreters for non-English-speaking patients, particularly among the Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees who frequently turn to Montefiore for health care.

Montefiore declined to address the employees’ allegations or answer questions about the incident.

“HIPAA and patient privacy rules prevent us from providing information about anyone who receives care from us either during their visit or after they have left our facility,” a spokesperson from an outside communications firm said in a statement emailed on Montefiore’s behalf.

Catholic Charities Community Services, which runs the group home where the woman was living, declined to comment. An NYPD spokesperson said there is no missing persons report on file for Mao, despite her dayslong disappearance from the facility.

The Family Health Center provides primary care to thousands of patients annually as a federally qualified health center, a type of clinic that receives enhanced federal funding to care for underserved populations and offers services at a reduced cost to low-income patients.

Last fall Montefiore closed another primary care clinic in the Bronx and relocated its providers and patients to the Family Health Center, while the center's family medicine training program was shifted to another location. Since then, the center’s patient volume has swelled — so much so that its remaining family medicine doctors are no longer accepting new patients, one of the current employees said.

The former employee said the health center’s waiting rooms are now so packed that a conference room is used for overflow. Volunteer patient advocates were once stationed in the waiting rooms, but the role seemingly disappeared with the consolidation, that person said.

Montefiore executives have not publicly addressed the rationale for the consolidation, but the financially struggling health system recently hired the consulting giant McKinsey & Co. to help it grow revenue and manage expenses.

The goal is to reach $500 million in annual savings, according to public financial disclosures.