University Hospital — Local services in Newark

TL;DR: This hospital will ignore your emergency (mine was a stopped heart) and send your bill to the debt agency because they can't be bothered to save your insurance information or look it up themselves. Go to a hospital in NYC, they respond immediately to emergencies.

I was admitted to the emergency room when I blacked out while at dinner. My sister, a EMS, told me I was unresponsive, my pulse stopped until I came to. After an EKG test and giving my insurance information we were to sit in the waiting room for 2 hours, no monitoring. We were then moved to another waiting area where I gave my insurance information again and waited another 30 minutes before finally getting into a room...and waited another 2 hours for the doctor to walk in. When she finally did show up she asked me what happened and when I told her I blacked out she informed me that I was in the wrong area; that I should have been in another emergency waiting room where my heart could be monitored. She brought in a nurse and asked if I was alone, I told her that I had 3 people with me to which they seemed shocked because I could have had them with me the whole time.

At this point I'm tired, hungry and scared beyond all reason. I was shuffled into yet ANOTHER waiting area where the nurse said she'd "be right with me" only 20 minutes later I'm still not hooked up to a monitor and one of my party finally found me after looking. I decided that if something were to happen it would have already happened and it could wait until I got back to NYC where the doctors and nurses actually respond to emergencies. I told the nurse I wanted to leave and she asked, "Are you refusing service?" I said that I hadn't received service in the last 4.5 hours I've been here so no. No one gave us any papers to sign out so we left.

Oh, but it's not over with this place. I received a call from billing informing me that I had a $627 bill (for no services rendered) and that they needed my insurance information. I informed the representative that 2 people had copied down and scanned my insurance information and that they had ran the EKG through my insurance company because I could see that on my EOB. I gave the insurance information to them again and received another call 2 weeks later saying that my information was incorrect... I gave it to them AGAIN.

5 months later I get a call from a debt collection agency demanding $627. At this point I am no longer employed with the company that provided the insurance, in fact I've moved to a completely different state. They are more than happy to take my credit card information but I asked them to wait. I called the insurance company (Oxford Medical) and the representative their, Michall, tried calling the hospital billing department. She tried calling the billing department and reception but both lines were dead ends: one rang a few then disconnected, the other lead to a full mailbox. She offered to try again but I asked if we could calling the debt collection agency since they obviously had a working line of communication with the hospital. She agreed and we called the agency back, they again asked me how I'd like to pay and I informed them that my insurance rep was on the line and would be happy to get the insurance information cleared up. You NEED your rep on the phone. The questions they asked for the insurance information are not something a member would have access to.

I hope that after 5 months, 3 phone calls to the hospital and 2 phone calls to the agency, one with the insurance rep on the line recording the entire conversation will FINALLY end this nightmare where I didn't receive any medical assistance aside...

my first impression of the hospital was amazing! I had been there a couple of times with my aunt and her doctors where very professional, and I can’t complain about the patient care she received. For this reason when I felt ill, I decided to go to the ER in this hospital. At first everything seemed ok, I went to the triage, took my Vitals, my info and asked me the reason for my visit. I told them I had chest pain and was having difficulting breathing because of a nasty cough. I was running a low grade fever and the nurse sent me to their “fast track”. The fast track had only four people ahead of me so I thought it would be quick. Little did I know that I was going to be sitting there for 3 hours before they found me a bed. But I didn’t think any of it, it is an ER after all, right? Well when I finally got a bed, the doctor took a little while to come to me and I had been having trouble breathing for over 3 hours and my fever was probably getting higher at this point. No one took my vitals again! I got no medication for my fever, nothing to open up my air ways, And no pain medication at least for my chest pain. The doctor finally came and said the were going to give me an X-ray to check up my lungs and do a flu test. But before the X-ray it is protocol to give you a pregnancy test because the X-ray could hurt the baby if the person might be pregnant and not know it. 2 hours later the nurse comes and takes me to the X-ray station, but have in mind they never did the pregnancy test but I didn’t say anything because I was sure I wasn’t pregnant and if I opened my mouth the freaking X-ray would have probably taken even longer and I didn’t want to be in this hospital one more minute! Well, they took the X-ray and took me back to the ER. Sat for another 2 hours and no one came. I came to notice that their “fast track” only had ONE DOCTOR!!! And two nurses for a whole floor of emergency patients!! Still with pain, and still having difficulty to breath I got up and looked for someone because I thought they had forgotten about me ! Well they did, indeed! The nirse completely Clueless asks me if I already got the X-ray! And I said yes! And never got the pregnancy test ! But don’t worry! I know I’m not pregnant! But if I am, I guess you just got your hospital into a lawsuit if the baby comes with any damage due to the X-ray, and smiled. She said she was going to look for the doctor and they finally checked my results and told me I had nothing that I could go!!! I wanted to kill all of them. After 7 freaking hours at the hospital, got Home with a higher fever & still having trouble breathing, because no one gave me something to help the breathing, and since no one took my vitals either, my fever just got higher and I received no medication to bring it down. That hospital its just filled with incompetent nurses, that have absolutely no bedside manner and definitely don’t know how to take care of their patients....

On 11-26-20, my wife collapsed and was admitted to this hospital. Her stay was until Sunday 12-6-20 when she died. During the time when she was there, the doctors involved with her care would schedule things with me to make me aware of what was going on and they wouldn't either show up for the appointment because they forgot or the message was not delivered to them. On another occasion, the nurses would say that they would allow my daughters and sister to come to the room and the people at the main entrance desk were not allowing us to do so. This was typically the way that things were throughout the stay of my wife from 11-26-20 to 12-6-20 when she passed away at 7:09 PM. During the afternoon hours of Sunday 12-6-20, my daughters, the cousin of my wife and I visited her for a final time. At or about 6:40 PM on 12-6-20, my older daughter came downstairs to the main lobby of the hospital crying uncontrollably because she was witnessing her mother going into distress in her room of F-220. My daughter told me that the doctors were requesting my presence up in the room due to the fact that her mother was bleeding from the mouth and was going into cardiac and respiratory failure. During this time, my younger daughter and I had turned in our visitors badges and we requested a new one from the main lobby desk. In spite of the fact that the doctors requested my presence, the woman who was at the desk flat out refused to give me access to another pass at or around 6:40 PM on 12-6-20. Despite my repeated attempts to get the woman at the desk to relent, she repeatedly refused to let me see my wife who subsequently died without my daughters or I to see her one final time. We all left the hospital in disgust and proceeded to drive home. On the way back home, I received a phone call from the hospital and when I picked up the phone and asked who it was, the other person who was on the other end of the line hung up on me which was at the time of when my wife passed away at 7:09 PM on 12-6-20. Since my wife has been deceased, the hospital had called me to retrieve her belongings and I attempted to do so on 12-9-20. Upon going into the Patient Services to the left of the main desk in the hospital to retrieve my wife's belongings, the patient services staff there couldn't locate the belongings and I had to find out that the hospital had turned them over to the funeral home after I called the funeral home to verify this. The staff was very cold, dismissive and very unprofessional in their handling of my wife's care from the doctors lack of communication, to the cold treatment of the front main desk and the patient services. This is what you can affectionately call a ghetto hospital and it deserves...