Why Lindsay Clancy's Discharge Was Signed By That Doctor

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Let's get more into the clinicians themselves, because before any of this, Lindsay Clancy was a labor and delivery nurse. In four months, she was treated by a psychiatrist, two psychiatric nurse practitioners, a hospital perinatal program and an inpatient stay at McLean. Her psychiatrist testified she never obtained records from any of them. Clancy, like I said, spent her career in labor and delivery, and every provider, it seems many of them, took her at her word. One of the things that really kind of shocked me a bit from Tufts' testimony the other day was taking the word of the client on her cocktails of medications that she was being given and being and taking.
That's great, that she has experience in this field. She can probably speak to it easier and more readily than the average Joe out there like myself. I'm like, what do you take? I'm like, let me check Walmart and look at the prescription list of what I have to be accurate with you. I'm sure that she was able to rattle some of that off. But at the same point, you're dealing with someone who is dealing with mental health problems. They may not be the most accurate. They may not necessarily be trying to hide something from you. They may not be capable of delivering that information to you as accurately as it should be delivered. Or they may be trying to hide too.

**Shavaun Scott** (1:35)
You just don't know.

**Tony Brueski** (1:37)
You don't know in a situation like that. So to be like, well, she's got some experience in this area. I'm just going to take her at her word. That seems to be negligent from a layperson standpoint. What's your thoughts?

**Shavaun Scott** (1:50)
Definitely negligent. When somebody is having serious symptoms that are impairing their function, they're saying, I'm getting worse. I'm not sleeping. Particularly 48 hours with no sleep.
And so many other red flags, right? We could write the book on all the red flags. The first thing you do, you call in the family.
And yes, you do need a release from the client to call in the family. But people will do that because the other thing, Patrick, you can sit if you're doing telehealth, you can say it looks like a screen like this. You can have two people sitting together and you can say, Patrick, what are you noticing? Her parents were involved. Her mother was sleeping with her at one point, coming in and staying with her. You want to talk to the mother.
What's alarming you? Obviously, you're seeing something. And you have to realize the patient often does not have the insight in order to explain. Act your, act your, and it doesn't mean that they're trying to be deceptive. They're not insightful because they're ill. And you've got to pull in, it's called the collateral visit. You've got to do collateral visits. Plus, you've got to talk to the other people who are doing treatment. And that just never happened here. That's fragmentation. That goes against our ethical guidelines. We're always supposed to collaborate with other people doing treatment. And if you are doing treatment, you are allowed under HIPAA to communicate with another person doing treatment for coordination of care. And you can share the diagnosis, you can share the symptoms, and you can share the treatment plan. And that, again, is standard of care. And nobody was doing it. And that's just flaring. McLean Hospital didn't do it.
And then when she was asked why, when Tufts was asked why you didn't do that, oh, well, our system doesn't hook up with their system. So you make a phone call, you know? You make a phone call.

**Tony Brueski** (3:51)
Yeah, it seems like there's so many institutional roadblocks that the people who are working for the institutions literally just treat as brick walls. Like, there's no going beyond this. Like, well, you really need to, though. Well, there's just no way of doing it. Like, there are, you're just choosing not to.

**Shavaun Scott** (4:10)
Choosing not to. When I used to see a lot of little kids, even high school kids, which I don't at this point, and they were having significant symptoms, I wanted to know what the teachers were seeing. I wanted to know what the school counselors were seeing, and I would always get a release. I got on the phone, sometimes the same day, call the teacher, let's schedule a collaboration here. What are you noticing? Are you noticing the same things I'm noticing? That's just good care.

**Robin Drake** (4:38)
I'm also curious, Shavaun, because we've been focusing on the behaviors of Lindsay and what she was sharing, attempting to share and not sharing, and the drop down memories, all that. And so people saying that she was kind of falling in what they were considering kind of normal for what they were seeing. But my curiosity is, let's reverse it a little now. Are you seeing the clinicians, because we've been talking about how the clinicians could have dug deeper. They could have talked to more people. They could have done all these things.