The pregnant woman’s due date was approaching when she arrived at a troubled public hospital in Brooklyn last month, complaining of stomach pain and nausea.
The woman, 24 years old and once a track-and-field star, was examined at the hospital, Woodhull Medical Center, and the medical staff told her to go home. But the nausea and stomach pain worsened. When she came back three nights later, she was admitted to the hospital and given a bed.
By the next day, she would be dead, after her baby was delivered by an emergency C-section, according to interviews with a medical worker at the hospital and the woman’s relatives.
The woman, Bevorlin Garcia Barrios, is the third woman to die during childbirth at Woodhull Medical Center since 2020, deepening concern about the beleaguered hospital’s ability to safely provide maternity care and deliver babies. Even before this latest death, Woodhull Hospital had emerged as a symbol of what New York City’s health department calls an “ongoing maternal health crisis” in the city. Woodhull, which straddles the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, is one of 11 city-run public hospitals and has been long regarded as one of the weaker institutions in the system.
In New York City, more than 20 women typically die each year from causes related to pregnancy or childbirth. The racial disparities are especially stark: Black women were nine times as likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth than white women from 2001 to 2019, according to city data.
The circumstances of the previous two maternal deaths at Woodhull have drawn widespread attention and alarmed hospital regulators. It is unclear whether government investigators are examining this latest death. But if errors by doctors or other medical lapses are found to be a primary cause for Ms. Garcia Barrios’s death, the public hospital system could come under growing pressure to increase staffing or add new safety protocols. Within Woodhull, there has been concern that regulators might close the hospital’s labor and delivery floor, where some 1,300 newborns are delivered each year.
The two earlier maternal deaths — one in July 2020, another in November 2023 — were a result of serious medical errors or lapses, according to hospital regulators, who detailed their findings in reports to the federal government. One doctor was fired, and another lost his medical license.
The death of Ms. Garcia Barrios, on Sept. 15, has not been reported publicly until now. The New York Times interviewed several medical workers who had been told about the death and interviewed her relatives as well. The medical examiner’s office is still investigating the cause, according to a spokeswoman for the office, Julie Bolcer.
Christopher Miller, a spokesman for the public hospital system, declined to comment, saying privacy laws prevented him from doing so. In recent years, NYC Health + Hospitals, as the public hospital system is called, has taken a number of steps to improve maternal health, including creating simulation labs for obstetric staff members to practice how they respond to various emergencies. “Over the last years, we have been particularly focused on helping reduce the unacceptable maternal mortality rates among women of color through innovative interventions,” Mr. Miller said in a statement.
In the days after Ms. Garcia Barrios’s death, some doctors, nurses and midwives at Woodhull have struggled to understand what went wrong — and why. In hindsight, the decision to send Ms. Garcia Barrios home earlier that week was seen as potentially troubling, according to one medical worker at Woodhull and two other people who have spoken with medical staff there. But so far, little explanation has emerged.
Those three people said that when Ms. Garcia Barrios returned to the hospital three days later and was admitted that Saturday night, her symptoms — severe abdominal pain and vomiting — as well as the fact that she had previously had a C-section might have signaled a serious problem. But there was no indication that her condition was treated as an emergency that night, the three people said.
The next morning, after a shift change, a doctor decided an emergency C-section was necessary, according to the people. The baby was delivered, but Ms. Garcia Barrios was bleeding severely and her lungs were failing. She was pronounced dead after a lengthy effort to resuscitate her.
According to Nelson Ramirez, 27, the father of the child, the visits to Woodhull were frustrating, partly because of translation issues. Since Ms. Garcia Barrios did not speak English, he said, the hospital insisted on an interpreter, even though he offered to interpret for her. He felt that Ms. Garcia Barrios’s complaints — the pain she felt, the vomiting, her stomach — ended up being watered down in translation.
After the C-section, Ms. Garcia Barrios’s condition suddenly worsened, and Mr. Ramirez said that because he was not the legal husband, he was not allowed to see her. “They said she was OK, and then something got complicated so they went back inside and then two hours later my wife was dead,” he said.
“Just on the very surface, that’s a preventable death,” said Dr. Amos Grünebaum, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra University, who had no connection to the case. “A mother who comes in with severe pain, is sent home, comes back, and then dies eventually,” he said, when told about Ms. Garcia Barrios’s case by The Times, is a sign that “something is wrong, and something needs to be done.”
After Ms. Garcia Barrios’s death, several of her relatives went to Woodhull to meet with doctors and a hospital social worker and find out what had happened. “There are a lot of things they haven’t told us,” Gilma Flores, one of her aunts, said in an interview.
The relatives said that during an initial meeting not long after Ms. Garcia Barrios’s death, the hospital offered to pay for her funeral. “She said that all the doctors were in shock because of what happened to Bevorlin, that they wanted to pay for the funeral,” Ms. Flores said. But at a subsequent meeting between doctors and the family, she said, that offer was never repeated.
Ms. Garcia Barrios’s newborn was transferred to Bellevue Hospital for head-cooling, a treatment often given to babies who were deprived of oxygen at birth, according to people who have spoken with medical workers at Woodhull. Ms. Garcia Barrios also had an 8-year-old daughter, relatives said.
Ms. Garcia Barrios emigrated from Honduras about six years ago. As a teenager, she had been a star sprinter and had once hoped to compete internationally, her relatives recalled. In New York, she had recently started working as a home health aide.
She had chosen to deliver at Woodhull because one of her aunts had delivered a baby there.
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