Bay Area hospitals to pay for mistakes
The California Department of Public Health has cited three Bay Area hospitals for noncompliance with licensing requirements that put patients at risk of serious injury or death. San Francisco General Hospital, Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, and the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose must pay the state administrative penalties for the infractions.
San Francisco General must pay twenty-five-thousand dollars for a September 2008 incident where a piece of surgical gauze was left in a patient. As a result the patient had to undergo a procedure to remove the foreign object. Kaiser was fined fifty-thousand dollars after it gave the wrong medication to a patient last January. That person later suffered a heart attack. Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, meanwhile, will also shell out fifty-thousand dollars for failing to properly diagnose and treat a patient who died last April after enduring seven hours in the emergency department while suffering from extreme anemia.
A 2007 California state law gives the Public Health Department the authority to levy fines against hospitals that fail to comply with certain licensing requirements. Last year the state doubled the penalty for a first offense from twenty-five to fifty-thousand dollars. Hospitals must pay seventy-five- thousand dollars for a second and one-hundred-thousand dollars for subsequent infractions. The medical centers are also required to implement plans of correction to prevent similar problems from happening in the future.
Dub Mission
facebook
twitter