A new state watch list for deadly patient-safety lapses flags 10 city hospitals, including Columbia-Presbyterian, where surgeons left foreign objects inside five patients.
Leaving surgical sponges or instruments inside patients can cause an infection, obstruction or more surgery. Columbia-Presbyterian’s rate of such a mistake — known in medicine as a “never event” because it is never supposed to happen — was the second highest in the state, according to a hospital report card out today.
Eighteen other city hospitals also reported such foreign-object incidents, the report found.
Those include Jamaica Hospital, which also made the watch list. And in another “never event” at the Queens hospital, a patient was given a transfusion with the wrong blood, according to the report.
“That is as serious as removing the wrong limb. That is very often fatal,” said Bruce Boissonnault, the president of the Niagara Health Quality Coalition, which puts out the annual report.
To land on the watch list, hospitals reported to the state a number of errors or poor results including higher than average death rates, rates of infection or complications.
At Columbia-Presbyterian, the rate of sepsis infections after surgery was worse than the state average, as was the rate of collapsed lungs.
It also reported between one and four deaths among patients unlikely to die while in the hospital, according to the report, which is based on 2009 state data.
The “hospital is committed to providing high quality health care and we are regularly ranked as one of the top hospitals in the country and the top hospital in New York by well-established surveys,” the hospital said in a statement.
The hospital’s Weill Cornell campus on the Upper East Side made it to the safest hospitals list, which also includes Lenox Hill, NYU Langone Medical Center and Montefiore’s Weiler Division in The Bronx.
5 cited for lapses
1. St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital
1-4 deaths in low-risk patients
2. Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital
Five instances of a foreign body left in a patient
3. Beth Israel Medical Center/Kings Highway Division
Poor rates of heart attack deaths
4. Brookdale University Hospital
Poor rates of postoperative hip fractures
5. Jamaica Hospital Medical Center
Wrong blood or blood type given to a patient.
The report card is available at http://www.myhealthfinder.com.