NORTHAMPTON — When Elna Davignon of Easthampton was taken to Cooley Dickinson Hospital last month by her son, she was fully dressed and carrying a pocketbook filled with cash, checks and identification.
Her illness landed her in Mercy Hospital in Springfield for emergency surgery and time in the intensive care unit. When four days later Davignon, 81, was released to a rehab clinic, her belongings were nowhere to be found.
“We weren’t thinking too much of looking for items,” her son Carl Davignon of Springfield said in an interview Monday.
Three weeks after her family’s unsuccessful attempts to find her personal property, Carl Davignon was offered a $50 gift certificate by Cooley Dickinson as compensation. The family has rejected it and had filed a police report instead, Carl Davignon said.
“If it happened to us, maybe it happened to somebody else and somebody else isn’t pursuing it,” he said.
The hospital’s policy is to document and secure belongings upon admission, spokeswoman Christina Trinchero wrote in an email to the Gazette. “If a patient has money, or anything they consider of value, we strongly encourage family members to take these items home with them,” she wrote. “Patients have an option of putting their valuables in a safe — which involves a multi-step signoff process — or keep their belongings with them. If they choose to keep their items with them, they sign a form that indicates they will be responsible for those items.”
Carl Davignon said his family did not immediately notice that his mother’s belongings had not followed her from hospital to hospital. He said he never went over a list of items while at Cooley Dickinson and never signed anything to do with the belongings.
It was his sister who first asked where her mother’s coat had gone, he said.
“We couldn’t find anything,” Davignon said.
He began asking around. Mercy Hospital had no inventory of her items, he said. He called the ambulance company that transported her between the two hospitals — he can’t now recall the name of the company — and got the same response.
After multiple attempts to get an answer from Cooley Dickinson, he said, a hospital representative this week finally told him the hospital did have an inventory list of her property, but its whereabouts is unknown.
“We can’t find it. We lost it,” Davignon recalled a hospital employee telling him.
In her email, Trinchero told the Gazette that if items are reported lost, the hospital conducts an internal investigation to try to find them.
“In such cases, we work with the patient and their family to make all efforts to find the items they identify as missing,” she wrote in an email.
Storage of items like clothing depends on where the patient is going within the hospital, according to Trinchero.
“This is why we emphasize that family members take items home with them, if they can, especially if someone is being admitted,” she wrote.
When asked what happens when the items are not found and what compensation is offered, Trinchero answered that each case is considered individually. She declined to comment on a specific case.
More than 33,000 patients are seen annually in Cooley Dickinson Hospital’s emergency department and another 77,000 are admitted to the hospital each year, according to figures provided by Cooley Dickinson.
Last year, the hospital had around 180 reports of missing items ranging from keys to items of clothing, Trinchero said, and 389 items were found on the hospital campus and stored, collected or returned to their respective owners.
Also last year, Cooley Dickinson’s security team handled 1,894 valuables, mostly for admitted patients, meaning they were signed in via security, transported to the safe, and signed out, documented, or returned to the patient or their family, according to Trinchero.
Trinchero said those numbers point to the process the hospital has in place which she called comprehensive and thorough.
Unhappy with the hospital’s gift certificate offer, Davignon reported his mother’s missing items to Northampton Police Monday afternoon.
Since 2012, Northampton police have taken eight reports of items that went missing or were stolen from inside the hospital. In March 2017, a nurse reported that her iPhone 6 was stolen while she was at work, according to police records. A month later, another woman reported to police that she left her iPhone 6 in a hallway bathroom in the hospital’s emergency room and when she went back an hour later to look for it, the phone was gone.
In August 2015, a woman reported to police that she discovered her belongings were missing following a procedure she had at the hospital. The woman learned her items accidentally had been sent home with another person. Two hospital employees retrieved the woman’s belongings for her, according to police records.
Davignon said he told police he knew his family’s case was a civil matter but wanted to document the incident with police anyway, according to the police report.
“I’m not going to let it go,” Davignon said of filing the report. “It’s not the money because that’s irrelevant. I don’t want it to happen again to anybody.”
Emily Cutts can be reached at ecutts@gazettenet.com.