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Cedars-Sinai Medical Center faces medical error claims
By Lauren | October 14, 2009
AOL reported this morning that California public health officials are looking into allegations of serious medical errors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Reportedly, the hospital’s CT scanner machine had been set to a higher level than it should have been since February of 2008. Patients who were scanned for stroke during the eighteen months before the alleged mistake was discovered got eight times the regular dose of radiation. According to the FDA, the potential impact of the overdoses was significant, putting the patients “at increased risk for long-term radiation effects.” The hospital allegedly failed to discover the problem until August of this year, when a patient reported losing hair after a scan.
Just imagine being the risk manager for that hospital.
The FDA has issued a warning to other hospitals to review their CT scan safety protocols. And Cedars-Sinai deserves due credit for notifying the patients who received scans before the problem was uncovered. But it’s troublesome that it took two months for this story to make the national news (especially when it sometimes seems as if Brittany Spears or Mel Gibson can hiccup at 6:00 AM and make the national morning news the very same day). This situation is not unlike product recalls - if you don’t know you bought a defective automobile, you won’t bring it in to be fixed. Cedars-Sinai patients whom the hospital couldn’t contact for some reason might have benefited if the scanner problem was reported in the media before now.
Eighteen months is a long time to go without checking the levels on a potentially dangerous diagnostic tool, and Cedars-Sinai certainly has some explaining to do. I’ve written a lot here about how the medical profession is using apologies to minimize malpractice litigation risk. Only time will tell if Cedars-Sinai will choose to pursue that approach and how well it will succeed.
To read the AOL story, go to http://news.aol.com/article/la-hospital-exposed-pat0ients-to-high/712354?icid_sphere_newsaol_inpage.
Topics: Apologies, Business Ethics, Professional Ethics, Risk Management, corporate responsibility, customer relations, ethics |