After retiring in 2002, she would wake at 5 a.m.
Miner knew most everyone in Eagle Butte, friends said. Miner raised four children on the reservation as a single mother. She raised three daughters and a son by herself in Eagle Butte-at about 1,300, the largest town on the reservation. She dropped out of high school, working construction and other jobs before becoming a nurse at the IHS hospital and then a detox coordinator. She grew up in one of the tiny Cheyenne River communities scattered across this isolated reservation roughly the size of Connecticut, learning to run cattle as a little girl from her rancher father. She stood 4-foot-11 and weighed barely 120 pounds, but her knack for small talk and storytelling, her sharp tongue and her spectacles gave her an air of authority. Kate Miner’s family wasn’t used to seeing her feeble and helpless.
Miner’s multiple visits to the Eagle Butte facility in 20. The Wall Street Journal reviewed hundreds of pages of medical records provided by the IHS to Ms. On much of the Cheyenne River Reservation, life expectancy is 67.6 years, according to data from a University of Wisconsin research group, more than 10 years less than the U.S. The agency is supposed to help a patient population often in desperate need of medical attention, with high rates of chronic illnesses and deaths related to substance abuse.
#Kate miner free
The IHS provides free health care for 2.6 million Native Americans under treaties between the U.S. The Cheyenne River Health Center has been cited by federal regulators for poor care. The Eagle Butte hospital’s top official, said the facility has a “sound medical records and records management program” and had improved the consistency of its care in recent years. In a court filing Friday, lawyers for the Justice Department denied the allegations. Miner’s case because of the pending litigation. Miner of how sick she was and failed to treat her illness. Tree Top sued the government over her mother’s care, alleging that the IHS never informed Ms. IHS hospitals, including the one in Eagle Butte, have been cited by regulators time and again over the past decade for dangerous medical care, including haphazard record-keeping, negligent follow-ups and sending home patients who turned out to be critically ill. Miner, like many of the agency’s patients, was let down by the care she got there, not because of one catastrophic medical mistake, but by a cascade of shortcomings that the agency has failed to fix despite years of promises from its leaders. In recent years, tribal leaders, health experts and federal regulators have identified widespread problems with the IHS. The Cheyenne River Sioux tribal chairman. “The sad thing is, our people don’t have a choice. Miner or other providers to ensure the right testing was done, according to the medical records and her family. When hospital staffers discovered serious health problems, the results weren’t clearly communicated to Ms.
Operational problems such as mismanaged patient chart systems affected her care, those records show. Miner’s symptoms but never followed up on initial concerns about her condition, making each visit effectively her first, medical records show. Miner’s daughter, combs through her mother’s medical records at her home in Eagle Butte.Īt the Cheyenne River Health Center in Eagle Butte, a succession of IHS medical providers treated Ms. Miner’s encounters with the IHS, and her family’s repeated efforts to get her help there, illustrate how the federal agency can fail the patients who need it most. Miner reached for her daughter’s hand and started to cry. “You have two very large masses in your right lung.
Miner lay crumpled on a hospital cot, the right side of her body shaking, a physician assistant ordered a CT scan, after her family insisted, according to the records and family members. Miner returned twice more to the hospital, the only one on the Cheyenne River Reservation, over the next six months, medical records show.įinally, on May 7, 2017, as the 67-year-old Ms. What is clear is that no further tests were done. Her family says they never were given such instructions and weren’t told of the two masses the X-ray revealed. Notations in her medical file indicate the doctor told her to come back for a lung scan the next day.
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