Arianna Duenez had struggled for years in residential treatment facilities in and out of California – becoming addicted to drugs in the process and increasingly expressing suicidal ideation.
There is plenty of room to debate tradeoffs in patient care. However, the policy was to perform a check every 15 minutes overnight. Not great for sleep quality and, all else being equal, a net negative for mental health. However, it does prevent a long tail of serious negative outcomes (such as, potentially, this death). There are a bunch of healthcare circumstances where sleep quality is sacrificed in favor of other concerns.
In this particular case, in addition to all of the normal concerns the facility would have, this girl was:
on a new medication
nauseous
unwell enough that she cut a phone call short to go to bed early (which sounds like was out of character for her)
Those are all red flags that her condition should be monitored closet than normal.
There is plenty of room to debate tradeoffs in patient care. However, the policy was to perform a check every 15 minutes overnight. Not great for sleep quality and, all else being equal, a net negative for mental health. However, it does prevent a long tail of serious negative outcomes (such as, potentially, this death). There are a bunch of healthcare circumstances where sleep quality is sacrificed in favor of other concerns.
In this particular case, in addition to all of the normal concerns the facility would have, this girl was:
Those are all red flags that her condition should be monitored closet than normal.