Accreditation

Maryland hospital fined for not reporting medical errors

Accreditation Connection, June 22, 2009

Maryland health regulators have fined Doctors Community Hospital in Prince George's Country after failing to report on the death of a patient and at least seven other serious incidents caused by mistakes from the medical staff, according to The Washington Post. Last month, the surgical hospital paid a $30,000 fine for violating the Maryland law that requires hospitals to report serious medical errors but was required to spend $65,000 to develop a patient safety program.

"We expect errors to occur," said Wendy Kronmiller, director of the state Office of Health Care Quality. "But we expect systems in place to catch them. What we found at Doctors is that the system essentially didn't exist."

This is the first fine in the five years that Maryland has required any serious errors to be made public.

State regulators found that Doctors Community Hospital did minimal investigative work to determine what went wrong and then did not classify the mistakes according to their level of seriousness, all of which is required by law. A few near misses, which include a reported assault on a patient by another's visitor, and an eight-day delay in getting medication to a 49-year-old man with a history of heart failure, were never investigated.

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