A highly critical federal government report on patient safety at Parkland Memorial Hospital will be released Friday at a special meeting of the hospital’s board of managers.“We promised we would release it as soon as it was finished, and that’s what we’re doing,” said Parkland spokeswoman April Foran.
Two dozen teams of doctors, nurses, lawyers and other hospital employees have spent the last two weeks developing a plan to correct problems that federal health care inspectors said threatened patient safety at the Dallas County public hospital, she said.
Investigators with the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, found that Parkland put emergency room patients’ lives at risk and failed to take sanitary measures, such as hand-washing, to prevent the spread of infection, according to an internal hospital memo circulated last week.
Those were the most severe failures of nine regulatory violations found by CMS during a sweeping inspection of the hospital in July. Parkland has until Saturday to submit to CMS a plan of corrective measures or face losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
The federal agency put Parkland on “immediate jeopardy’’ status, the most severe designation regulators can give medical facilities. That means the government is concerned that a “crisis” exists and that funding should be terminated if the situation isn’t corrected.
The CMS inspection was triggered by the Feb. 10 death of George Cornell, a patient in Parkland’s psychiatric emergency department. He died in solitary confinement after being pinned face-down by two staff technicians. Parkland failed to report the death to federal and state regulators, as required, and officials began investigating only after The Dallas Morning News publicly revealed it.
To read the full article please visit www.dallasnews.com .
To read about case studies of successful patient safety programs in hospitals please visit Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare
No comments:
Post a Comment