FORT WORTH, Texas — John Peter Smith Hospital workers had been "working on or resetting" elevators at the Fort Worth hospital, and Thyssenkrupp – the company hired to maintain the elevators – had asked the hospital to stop doing so, days before a nurse was seriously injured in accident on an elevator, according to documents released by Thyssenkrupp on Thursday.
JPS staffers were "complicating efforts to repair elevators," Thyssenkrupp regional president Pete Engwer said in a statement on Thursday, after the company's Jan. 11 letter to JPS officials was released. "When untrained individuals perform elevator-related activities...that not only puts maintenance personnel in jeopardy, but it also puts the riding public at risk as well."
On Jan. 20, JPS nurse Carren Stratford was seriously injured when she stepped onto an elevator at the hospital and the elevator kept going up, JPS CEO Robert Earley has said.
Stratford was in a coma for 15 days and just this week was released from intensive care.
Earley has said that a lawsuit against Thyssenkrupp was a possibility and that the company was "unresponsive" in the incident.
"We are not elevator experts," Earley said in a news conference last week. "You hire elevator experts, and we thought we had elevator experts. We've got a contract that clearly spells out what elevator companies are supposed to do to help with safety and security of everyone that works here."
Along with the release of the cease-and-desist letter, Thyssenkrupp also disputed Earley's claim that the company was unresponsive.
The company said it was onsite within 15 minutes of the Jan. 20 accident. Engwer, in his statement, said JPS has been reluctant "to provide us with any pertinent details" about the incident.
"To be clear, the hospital has shared no information directly with us," Engwer said.
Engwer said JPS staffers freed passengers from a trapped elevator, instead of contacting Thyssenkrupp's technician who works full-time at the hospital.
"Hospital staffers, while they may be well-meaning, are complicating efforts to repair elevators," Engwer said. "When these staffers reset a stopped elevator, it erases the diagnostic record that is critical for our maintenance personnel to determine the root cause."
Earley, the JPS CEO, responded to Thyssenkrupp's claims with a letter to Engwer, saying, "We never repair elevators. We save lives."
"And we never jeopardize the health or safety of our patients, team members or visitors by forcing them to remain in elevators which are incapacitated by TKE's failure to live up to its obligations," Earley wrote. "When every minute spent trapped in a broken elevator can be the difference between life and death, JPS team members will respond. What would you have us do, wait minutes, sometimes hours for TKE workers to show up? There is nothing in the contract JPS has with TKE that prevents us from responding appropriately when someone is trapped inside an elevator."
Read Earley's full letter here.