I was shocked when syracuse.com | The Post-Standard reporter Marnie Eisenstadt first mentioned working on a story about kids with behavioral problems being abandoned at Upstate Golisano Children’s Hospital. It was hard to believe that was really happening, but Marnie started hearing rumblings of such cases six years ago.
“This was something we first heard about during the pandemic, but we didn’t know the extent of it or how dangerous some of these children were until recently,” she said. “When the nurse was attacked (last month), a source reached out to me to tell me about how bad things were.”
In her reporting this week, Marnie brought to light a troubling situation that the Central New York community should know and care about. In February, a pediatric nurse at Upstate was knocked unconscious by a 12-year-old who was staying at the hospital, despite having no medical condition requiring treatment. The boy, who had been left at the emergency room after he became too violent for the people caring for him, is not an outlier. As Marnie reported, abandoned children, known as “social admissions” (children admitted for non-medical reasons), often take up as many as 10 of the hospital’s 56 acute care beds meant for sick children. They are left there by parents, social workers and law enforcement officers when they don’t know where else to go. Some end up staying at the hospital for up to a year…