Several children died after heart surgery at one of the
country's top hospitals, leading doctors to declare that they wouldn't even
send their own kids there for surgery.
In a months-long investigation, The New York Times found
death rates in the pediatric cardiac unit of the University of North Carolina
Children's Hospital was about five percent, higher than the two-to-three
percent average of most hospitals in the country.
At least four deaths were confirmed in just a three-month
period alone.
Secret audio recordings obtained by The Times showed that
several physicians questioned the care that patients were receiving.
UNC Health does not provide its mortality data to the public
website of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons.
But in raw data shared with The Times, the hospital had
higher death rates than almost all of the other hospitals, 82 in total, that do
share their data.
Between July 2013 and June 2017, about a four-year period,
the mortality rate was 4.7 percent.
The Times reported that children were experiencing
complications following low-risk procedures and deaths after high-risk
surgeries.
Between March and May 2016, at least two infants died
following their respective operations.
And a two-year-old girl's parents were told she should
recover well from her surgery, only to be put on life support later that night.
So, in June 2016, the nine pediatric cardiologists who
worked at the hospital at the time met with top administrative staff to discuss
these cases.
An unknown source secretly recorded this meeting, and that
recording was obtained by The Times.
Dr Timothy Hoffman, the chief of pediatric cardiology, told
his colleagues in one of the recordings: 'It's a nightmare right now. We are in
crisis, and everyone is aware of that.'
In another recording, cardiologist Dr Blair Robinson said
that he wouldn't send his own children to UNC for care.
'I ask myself: "Would I have my children have surgery
here?"' Dr Robinson is heard telling the other doctors.
'In the past, I'd always felt like the answer was
"yes" for something simple...But now, when I look myself in the
mirror, and what's gone on the past month, I can't say that.'..
But hospital administrators brushed these concerns aside.
Dr Kevin Kelly, the head of Children's Hospital, is heard
telling the cardiologists in one recording that performing fewer surgeries
could lead to job cuts...
In the secretly recorded meetings, cardiologists said they
could point to a few examples of why their patients were doing so poorly after
surgery.
One reason was that two pediatric cardiac intensivists,
which treat children with complex congenital and acquired heart defects, had
left UNC in 2015.
The hospital also didn't have a cardiac intensive care unit,
which is an ICU that focuses on diseases and surgeries related to the heart.
Worries were also expressed about Dr Michael Mill, who was
the chief surgeon at the time.
The Times revealed that a few weeks before the meeting, Dr
Mill had not gone to the hospital on a weekend to perform a transplant surgery
on a baby when a donor heart became available.
The baby eventually received another heart at Duke
Children's Hospital, also in North Carolina, but physicians at UNC were
'horrified'...
UNC told the Times that Dr Mill is currently taking a leave
from the hospital for family medical reasons.
This is not the first heart surgery program to come under
fire for questionable practices.
In 2018, the Tampa Bay Times reported that Johns Hopkins All
Children's Hospital in Florida had experienced a death rate among pediatric
heart surgery patients that had tripled.
The team stopped performing surgeries in the aftermath of
the investigation...
Meanwhile, The Times
is suing UNC to obtain risk-adjusted mortality data to confirm other deaths.
The hospital insists its program is 'very strong' and
criticized the newspaper's report.
'We are proud of our pediatric congenital heart surgery
program, and our current team is receiving top results that would place us
among the best in the nation,' UNC Health wrote in a statement in part.
'We have been engaged in continuous quality improvement
efforts for decades and have made significant improvements in the past 10+
years.
'To characterize today's program as anything but strong,
would not only be misleading, but not factual. To say we ignored issues would
also be false.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7099237/Investigation-reveals-xx-children-died-heart-surgery-hospital.html
https://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2017/03/transparency-update.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2015/06/transparency.html
No comments:
Post a Comment